Carlo Grante Concludes Scarlatti Project

courtesy of Naxos of America

One week from today Music & Arts will release the sixth and final volume in Italian pianist Carlo Grante’s project to record all of the keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti. This has been a major journey, since the first volume was released in April of 2010. My own interest in this collection did not begin until early in 2014, during my time with Examiner.com, which meant that I had to catch up on the earliest releases. Furthermore, while I was keeping up with Grante’s releases, Warner Classics reissued its box set of all of Scarlatti’s keyboard sonatas performed by the late harpsichordist Scott Ross, meaning that I now have at my disposal two “complete” Scarlatti collections. As expected, Amazon.com has already created a Web page for pre-ordering the final Grante release.

The Ross collection works its way through the catalog numbers of Ralph Kirkpatrick over the course of 33 CDs. The final CD includes entries in the catalog that are not for solo harpsichord. This accounts for all 555 entries in Kirkpatrick’s catalog. Grante’s collection runs to 35 CDs and is organized by the dates of publications and miscellaneous manuscripts. The total number of tracks is 570. Thanks to the Apple Music app, I was able to determine that, if played without interruption, it would take 1.7 days to listen to the entire Grante collection.

Grante’s final volume begins with the 42 sonatas in the last of the fifteen Parma volumes, published in 1757. This is followed by those sonatas published in Venice in 1742 and 1749 that are not found in any of the Parma volumes. Taken together, these account for all but the last two tracks of the first five CDs. Those two tracks and the remaining two CDs account for a wide variety of miscellaneous sources, not all of which were cataloged by Kirkpatrick, which is why Grante’s track-count exceeds Kirkpatrick’s total. Whether or not Grante’s collection is “complete” will be decided by future doctoral candidates in musicology.

Mind you, neither the Ross nor the Grante releases were intended for “marathon” listening. Back in my student days, I used to see billboard ads for the Sunday issue of The New York Times with the slogan, “You don’t have to read it all, but it’s good to know it’s all there!” I like to think of both releases as valuable reference resources. In Grante’s case that includes questions of grand piano technique that will do proper justice to Scarlatti’s polyphony.

I also would like to believe that these releases can serve as valuable resources for students aspiring to make a career as keyboard performers. Audiences deserve to know that there is far more to Scarlatti’s output than the few sonatas that Vladimir Horowitz would crank out in his recital programs. My piano teacher in Santa Barbara encouraged me to venture into the less-familiar sonatas; and, thanks to IMSLP, I can continue those explorations with sonata-by-sonata downloads. As a result I have taken great pleasure in following Grante’s journey from beginning to end; and I feel strongly that any fraction of those 1.7 days required to listen to the entire collection will be time well spent.