Word: domenico
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...DOMENICO SCARLATTI: SONATAS FOR HARPSICHORD, VOL. VIII (Westminster). Musicians call Scarlatti's music "naked" because the performer is so exposed. Fernando Valenti need fear no such exposure, and has recorded more than 400 of Scarlatti's short sonatas. Scarlatti started to write them when he was 53; all but one of these twelve were written in his late 60s, when his earlier keyboard virtuosity made way for more provocative harmonies and modulations. Valenti's interpretation is vigorous, with a flamenco flair now and then, well-suited to Scarlatti's Spanish side...
...next day, when an old clerk dies, Domenico is promoted and his destiny is sealed. As his father exclaims, too joyfully, "He has a job for the rest of his life." He will grow old with the company...
...beauty of Olmi's firm lies in his suggestion that even this gray existence contains moments which justify the trumpets of his title--moments that make them more than the toy horn Domenico awkardly tweetles at the party, more than the imaginary bugles his mother must blow to wake him for work. In part they celebrate the quiet heroism required to endure the drabness of day to day experience. More important, they herald those unexpected appearances which break the stultifying regularity in which Domenico finds himself trapped; the possibility of love and the hope that love promises...
...Domenico's love is Antonietta, a girl whom he first sees at the company exams, and from whom he is separated by the precious jobs which might have brought them together. The company's vast impersonality keeps them apart, but is at least partially transcended by their glances, by their slight contact, and by the chance that they may some day truly discover one another. It is this possibility for change, for mutuality, that life extends to Domenico, which lifts his colorless routine into the realm of emprise. It is this possibility which lends animation, humor, and warmth...
Olmi has directed his first feature film with a poetic, slowly-paced delicacy that reminds one of Truffaut; he handles the fumbling love between Domenico and Antonietta with a subdued richness of feeling that characterized the most subtle moments of Chayefsky's Marty. He focuses his camera on countless specks of life which we, as well as his own characters, have hurried past. And a potent, bottled-up vitality swells from under even the most mundane street scene or conversation. Declining the easy gimmicks of wierd camera angles or background music, yet nevertheless infusing his simple story with extraordinary emotional...