Maria Canals Winner Plays Soler: Volume 10

courtesy of Naxos of America

Almost two years have elapsed since this site reported on the Naxos release of the ninth volume in its current (and second) project to record all of the keyboard sonatas of Antonio Soler. This project was organized around piano performances played by prize-winning pianists from the annual Maria Canals International Music Competition in Barcelona. The pianist featured on the ninth volume was Armenian-born Levon Avagyan, who won First Prize (as well as the audience prize and several further special awards) at the 2017 Competition.

Earlier this month Naxos released the tenth volume in this series, which is accounting for all 120 sonatas in numerical order. Readers may recall that the ninth volume marked a major shift in Soler’s approach to composition. While the first 90 sonatas were all single-movement compositions, the last two sonatas on that volume were structured in four movements, the first two in a collection published as Opus 4. Following conventions in both Italy and Vienna, Opus 4 was a collection of six sonatas; and the new recording consists entirely of the next three from this set: Number 3 in F major, Number 4 in G major, and Number 5 in A major. Structurally, all five of these sonatas follow a similar structural pattern for the four movements:

1. Slow
2. Fast
3. Two minuets
4. Fast

It would be fair to say that, from his “vantage point” at the royal palace of King Philip II of Spain, Soler was definitely influenced by the eighteenth-century practices to the east, particularly in Vienna. Nevertheless, he continued to exercise his own “Spanish rhetoric” and his characteristically challenging virtuoso technique. In that context, the pianist on this tenth volume, Evgeny Konnov (born in Uzbekistan), can be credited with “taking up the torch” of the pianists featured on the first nine volumes. Like his predecessors, he had won the first prize at the 64th Maria Canals International Music Competition in Barcelona, which took place in 2018; and his performances of these three sonatas were recorded for Naxos in December of 2019 in the Spanish city of Lloret de Mar.

In other words this new album was ready for release prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, since the ninth volume had been released in April of 2019, Naxos had probably planned the new release to take place about a year later. Unfortunately, after those twelve months had elapsed, the pandemic had put an end to “business as usual,” which probably included the scheduling of the Canals Competition. Hopefully, this new recording is a sign that the overall project is back “on the road again;” and plans are being prepared for selecting the performers for the remaining 25 sonatas in the Soler canon.