Soler, A: Keyboard Sonata No. 117 in D minor

Soler composed day and night in his monastic cell near Madrid and produced nearly 500 works in three decades and they demonstrate the Spanish rococo’s radiant and vibrant zest for life. Godelieve Schrama has examined Soler’s famous harpsichord sonatas with an eye to her instrument, the harp, and recorded them for the first time on SACD.

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.

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.