Score and parts for hire

Commissioned by the Britten Sinfonia, Evelyn Glennie and Woodend Arts Association. One of Domenico Scarlatti’s contemporaries described him as ‘a grave young man dressed in black and in a black wig’. When he played it was as if ‘ten hundred devils had been at the instrument’. Scarlatti was born in Naples in 1685 (the same year as Bach and Handel) and worked mostly in Portugal and Spain. He wrote five hundred and fifty five keyboard sonatas (which he called ‘essercizi’). He described them as ‘an ingenious Jesting with Art’. There are three in this set of transcriptions: K.435, a toccata, K.213, slow and dissonant, and K.181.

© John Woolrich 2005