Recording of the Week, Federico Colli plays Domenico Scarlatti

The 29-year-old Italian pianist Federico Colli took first place at both the Salzburg Mozart Competition and The Leeds International Piano Competition in the 2011/2012 season, and if I say that this collection of Scarlatti sonatas makes it easy to see why, that’s intended as more than a generic statement on the quality of his playing. The wit and elegance which are prequisites for an outstanding Mozart interpreter, as well as the more overt virtuosity and horse-power required for the bigger-boned repertoire that often features at Leeds are both in startling evidence in this programme, and the fact that Colli is able to switch from one to the other in the blink of an eye is what makes this one of the most compelling piano recitals I’ve heard all year (and with recent recordings from Murray Perahia, Paul Lewis, Alfred Brendel and Alexander Melnikov in the frame, that really is saying something).

Even if I hadn’t spoken to Colli at length about the project a few weeks ago, I’d still be in no doubt of his deeply ingrained affection for this music and its creator from the recording alone: his empathy and infectious enthusiasm are writ large in every phrase. Without dropping too many spoilers about our interview (which will appear later this month), Colli sees the composer as a deeply conflicted, almost Romantic figure whose music is shot through with a melancholy which emanates from various sources: his Oedipal relationship with a father whose musical legacy he could never hope to outstrip (Colli contends that opera sat the top of the musical hierarchy in early eighteenth-century Naples, and Scarlatti Senior was feted as a master of the genre), and the sense of alienation which he experienced after decamping first to Lisbon and then to Madrid to plough his own furrow. (The latter move would result in a friendship with fellow Neapolitan ex-pat Farinelli – Scarlatti scholar Ralph Kirkpatrick views the great castrato’s letters as one of the most insightful sources into the composer’s life, and Colli plays up the cantabile qualities of some of the later sonatas which he quite possibly inspired for all they’re worth).

Indeed it’s this prevailing melancholy which book-ends Colli’s recital: he opens with the relatively lengthy F minor K19 Sonata, conjuring a mood of desolate introspection and sculpting its plaintive lines with expressive rubato, and closes with an equally wistful D minor sonata which had a question-mark hanging over its authenticity until comparatively recently. It’s certainly not all doom and gloom, though: regardless of how much you buy into the recital’s grouping of the sonatas into ‘chapters’ with titles such as ‘Live happily!’ and ‘The Return to Order’, there’s no denying that this programme of contrasts is beautifully balanced, and the extrovert energy of showy, dance-influenced sonatas such as K492 and 525 is irresistible – perhaps they’d have worked their magic on Farinelli’s lugubrious patron Philip V, who famously hired the singer to carry out an early example of music-therapy.

Angela Hewitt is perhaps the obvious point of comparison when it comes to recent Scarlatti cycles on modern piano, and the contrasts between the two approaches could hardly be more vivid. If Hewitt played up the stile galante delicacy of the music, Colli’s approach is generally more muscular, exuberant and adventurous: through liberal use of rubato, ornamentation and dynamic contrasts, he’s keen to point up not only the staggering variety of Scarlatti’s invention, but also the radical qualities of a composer who not only blurred the boundaries between the Baroque and Classical styles but frequently pushed beyond both with writing that looks forward to Beethoven and even beyond. (Two stand-outs on this recording are the toccata-like F major sonata (K525) which Hans von Bülow likened to the scherzo of a Beethoven symphony, and the strange improvisatory A major sonata (K208) which shares rather more than a key-signature with the later composer’s Op. 101).

The album is the first in a projected Scarlatti series, and Colli’s imaginative powers are such that I’d happily listen to him performing the remaining 500-odd sonatas back-to-back, but let’s see what he and Chandos have in store – a Goldberg Variations, for instance, would be a hugely enticing prospect.