263 CD / Scarlatti: Complete piano sonatas vol. 4
Description
You know this phenomenon? You impose restrictions on yourself and watch a thing or do an operation within these limits, and as a result you extend the horizon and find a new world seeming bigger than the whole. It is like a magnifier showing new details hidden under the roughness of the surface. Welcome in the world of 555 Domenico Scarlatti piano sonatas! Most of them have only one movement with one double bar in the middle and two repetitions. In his self-created cosmos Scarlatti moves totally spontaneous, confident and unsystematical. Inside the system he breaks nearly all rules such as 4 bar scheme, style, rhythms, colours, playful like a child that does not know if there are any limits and where they are. However you have to take the magnifier, otherwise you stay outside on the surface. This is exactly what Christoph Ullrich does. He looks for every sonata and its character in detail and lives all the playfulness of Scarlatti with enthousiasm. Volume 4, seventh release of the 17 part complete edition shows another chaotic solar system of the Scarlatti universe. Fascinating, weird, glittering and beautiful.
Further information about the Scarlatti Project.
Christoph Ullrich on Youtube: Sonata in g moll K 8, Allegro and Sonata in C major, K 487, Allegro
3 reviews for 263 CD / Scarlatti: Complete piano sonatas vol. 4
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Audio Nr. 5 2020 –
Christoph Ullrich continues his 2011 recording of all 555 (harpsichord) sonatas by Scarlatti (1685-1757), an elective Spaniard and Bach/Händel contemporary. The Kirkpatrick numbers K 147-176 are consistently single-movement, often dance-like in character, and always interesting. Ullrich's enormously variable, gestural playing on the Steinway D274, never reduced to rhythmic finesse, gives them their own mood from serene to melancholy. Sound engineer Andreas Spreer recorded in the traditional Jesus-ChristusKirche in Berlin-Dahlem with a perfect balance of direct and indirect grand piano sound.
Lothar Brandt
Pizzicato –
--> original review
The German pianist Christoph Ullrich presents the fourth volume of his complete recording of Domenico Scarlatti's sonatas on Tacet. Vol. 1, 2, 3, 11, 14 and 15 have already been released, and the new double CD contains the sonatas K. 147 to 176. The recipe for success of the previous recordings also applies to this program with its 30 sonatas. Ullrich plays with much imagination, inspiration, spontaneity and deep feeling for Scarlatti's melancholy as well as for his joie de vivre! The richly nuanced playing gives each sonata its own unique character.
Remy Franck
MDR Kultur Spezial –
(...)His eminent pianism accordingly listens inward, plumbs the world between the notes, nuances and details emerge exemplarily under his eloquent hands.
His touch shadings, his ability to model tones, his means to play contouredly at the same time as keeping things in suspension. All this competence to unfold a musical text in a differentiated way is evident in his exegeses of Scarlatti. And such flexibility and pianistic distinction is absolutely necessary if one intends to depict each of these 555 sonatas as an individual, solitary cosmos. I am already looking forward to the next installment of Ullrich's Scarlatti readings.(...)
Martin Hoffmeister