Maria Canals Winner Plays Soler: Volume 9

A little over a week ago Naxos released the ninth volume in its second project to record all of the keyboard sonatas of Antonio Soler. As has already been observed, while the first project consisted entirely of harpsichord performances by Gilbert Rowland, the second has been organized around piano performances played by prize-winning pianists from the annual Maria Canals International Music Competition in Barcelona. The pianist on this latest volume is Armenian-born Levon Avagyan, who won First Prize (as well as the audience prize and several further special awards) at the 2017 Competition:

Levon Avagyan (photograph by Lucija Novak, courtesy of Naxos of America)

The sonatas on this new release cover the numbers between 87 and 92 in the numbers provided by the seven volumes of Samuel Rubio’s publications of Soler’s keyboard works. Once again, the attentive listener finds Soler departing from the single-movement compositions that he had encountered by his colleague at the court of Philip II of Spain, Domenico Scarlatti, in favor of works with multiple movements. Indeed, the last two sonatas on this album both consist of four movements; and Number 92 suggests that Soler was well aware of what Joseph Haydn was doing at the other end of the European continent.

Readers may recall that the eighth volume in this series included a sonata in F-sharp major (Number 79). It is unclear that musicians of Soler’s time gave much thought to the affective characteristics of F-sharp major. In the early nineteenth century, Christian Schubart described those characteristics as follows:

Triumph over difficulty, free sigh of relief uttered when hurdles are surmounted; echo of a soul which has fiercely struggled and finally conquered lies in all uses of this key.

However, this text seems to have more to do with the performer than with the listener. On this new volume F-sharp major surfaces again in the single-movement Number 90; and Schubart’s words could just as easily apply to the ways in which the hands have to cross great distances on the keyboard as they do with dealing with a challenging key signature.

Whatever the composer’s intentions may have been, Avagyan is definitely an agile performer. He also brings good-natured affability to even the most challenging of the passages he performs. He may be experiencing a “sigh of relief” (or two) in his head each time he surmounts one of those challenges; but, on the listener’s side, the prevailing experience is one of delight at the wide diversity of rhetorical stances encountered in Soler’s compositions.