Soler, A: Fandango

Born in the same year as Handel and Bach in 1685, the Neapolitan harpsichordist Domenico Scarlatti was a virtuoso with a very particular style. In Madrid, he became 'Domingo Escarlatti' and lived as a music teacher to Queen Maria-Barbara. He wrote almost 555 sonatas in which he created an explosion of wide ranging sounds from Italy and Spain. As he was able to utilise the technical possibilities of the harpsichord to the full, he produced the mournful notes of the hunting horns as well as the passionate chords played on a flamenco guitar. This programme also presents the 'Fandango' of his disciple, Padre Antonio Soler, a sort of virtuoso dance on an ostinato. The harpsichord played on this disc is an Italian model, conceived by Philippe Humeau, with a warm sound which is ideal for this repertoire.

Keyboard music in the Iberian Peninsula during the first half of the eighteenth was dominated by three composers; Carlos Seixas (1704-1742), Padre Antonio Soler (1729-1783) and Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757). These three composers were instrumental in the growth of the binary form sonata in the Iberian Peninsula which dominated harpsichord music to an even greater degree than the tiento in the previous two centuries. The harpsichord sonatas of Carlos Seixas and Padre Antonio Soler strongly reveal the influence of Scarlatti with whom they studied. All three were also instrumental in developing the ‘novel’ galant style that effectively provided a stepping stone between the Baroque and Classical periods.

Soler was an Augustian monk and the debate clearly splits musicologists as to whether or not Soler was a great composer or a minor Spanish composer of the 18th century. Many people have said that an ordained monk could not possibly write such cheerful music! This is a beautiful programme of music played by Nicolau de Figueiredo on an instrument built by Emile Jobin after Cresci, Livorno, 1778.

Having scaled (for Brilliant Classics) the musical Everest that is Domenico Scarlatti's 555 keyboard sonatas, Pieter-Jan Belder now turns his attention to his Spanish contemporary, Antonio Soler. Solers productivity was hardly less astonishing, especially as a monk at the abbey of El Escorial required to spend much of his time either in contemplation or directing the abbeyÂ’s music. In this capacity he would most likely have met Scarlatti, as the latter accompanied his royal patrons to their summer retreat at El Escorial. SolerÂ’s keyboard sonatas are also bipartite constructions, with new twists of harmony and invention around each unexpected corner. This first volume is completed by one of the most curious of all harpsichord works, a Fandango with a slowly evolving, hypnotic effect that has more than once been compared to Ravel's Boléro.