Word: scarlatti
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...Bach Society closed its season last night with a program commendably chosen and performed. Gregory Biss and the orchestra warmed up Allessandro Scarlatti's Concerto in F for Strings, a brief and harmonically simple piece culminating in a robust gigue...
When Valenti works hard at it, the harpsichord business is terrific. He has already recorded 350 of Domenico Scarlatti's 555 sonatas, and the demand for his records has pushed him into some of the worst harpsichord music ever written: "First we did the flute and harpsichord sonatas of Bach. They went well, so we did the sonatas of Handel-which are bad Bach. They sold; so next we did the sonatas of Telemann-bad Handel. Then came the works of Frederick the Great-which are awful Telemann. We even considered the music of Frederick's sister Amelia...
Actually, one can cavil only in retrospect at de los Angeles' choice of music, for even an old concert-favorite like Scarlatti's Le Violette pleases us anew when clothed in such velvety beauty of sound as the Spanish soprano produced last Wednesday. Still more noteworthy--because less expected--was the increased command which de los Angeles seems recently to have developed over the realm of German lieder. Her exuberant performance of Schubert's Mein! made me forget for a moment that the songs from Die Schone Mullerin and hardly suited to a woman's voice and manner...
Excitement was missing, too, from the 18th century arias with which Miss Berganza opened her recital: she sang them very nicely indeed (except for a disastrous trill in Handel's Lascia ch'io pianga), but instead of the grand manner and absolute command of style so necessary for Alessandro Scarlatti or Cherubini, she provided a good deal of hand-clasping and those imploring looks to the heavens which ought to be banned forever from the concert stage. In Rossini's Non Piu mesta (from La Cenerentola)--and Miss Berganza has something of a reputation as a Rossini specialist--one again...
...Scarlatti-Tommasini: The Good-Humored Ladies; Bach-Walton: The Wise Virgins (the Concert Arts Orchestra, Robert Irving conducting; Capitol). Two ballet scores, dating respectively from 1917 and 1940. The Ladies, adapted by Italian Composer Vincenzo Tommasini from the works of Scarlatti, is airy, bright, bubbling, and contains scarcely a note that does not please the ear. The Virgins, adapted from the works of Bach by England's William Walton, is unfailingly evocative of a less harried time. Neither of the ballets survives as a stage work, but their music deserves a better fate-and gets it here...