Domenico Scarlatti
Highlights from The Complete Sonatas

The increasing popularity of Scarlatti’s music is due to a number of factors, but largely to his uncanny knack of immediately grabbing the listener’s attention with innovative ideas, captured within the short framework of a ‘simple’ binary form sonata. Selecting a series of sonatas that would form a ‘favourites’ CD really was the most extraordinarily difficult task as there are very few in the five hundred and sixty or so opus that don’t actually live up to expectations; there is always something novel that has an instant appeal. It’s rather like reading a good book that once begun, is difficult to leave. Just when I had whittled my selection of sonatas down to a mere three hundred, another becomes a strong contender that you simply cannot omit; you can see what I mean ...