Domenico Scarlatti: A Man of Genius offers the listener a significant selection of harpsichord sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti performed by Francesco Corti. The pieces are drawn from the main surviving manuscripts to include his works. In other words, the 18th-century volumes today preserved in the Biblioteca Marciana of Venice and the Biblioteca Palatina of Parma. Other sources for the sonatas played here are manuscript collections preserved in the archives of Münster, Vienna, Zaragoza and Lisbon, all slightly later than the Venice and Parma sources, but nonetheless also of great documentary importance.

What distinguishes the choices made in this album is that the sonatas chosen are only from the Venice and Parma volumes dated to the years 1752-1753. This selection is therefore clearly circumscribed, even if the dates refer, in all probability, to the copying of the musical texts, not to their actual composition.

In fact, the question of the dating of Scarlatti’s sonatas has long been debated and has never been convincingly resolved; indeed, given the penury of first-hand information, it will perhaps never be completely clarified. In the case of the sonatas recorded here, the most authoritative recent Scarlatti studies suggest that the period of composition should be dated approximately to the decade prior to copying (hence 1742-1752), though many doubts on the matter remain. For some scholars this window should probably be extended further, backdating it to at least around 1730. Nonetheless, over and above the conjectured chronology, all of these sonatas testify to both a compositional maturity, evidently built on long experience, and a prodigious originality of style.

Francesco Corti, Harpsichord