"Sheer joy in music-making is as evident here as the sense of piety required by what are, after all, holy works. Yet it is difficult to begrudge Vox Luminis the feeling of joy at the astonishing sounds they are able to produce. The spirit of devotion is very much alive here too, in an album that pays equal attention to the holy and the heady."

Italian singer Sara Mingardo is considered among the more important contraltos of her generation. Her repertory is broad, encompassing works by composers from Monteverdi to Britten, though she has scored some of her greatest successes in operas and sacred music of the Baroque.

I have several problems with this Gaudeamus release. Firstly, I selected this recording for review on the basis that it was a disc of Domenico Scarlatti’s Sinfonie and concerti and the front cover of the booklet bears that out. This release in fact has three short Domenico Scarlatti scores with two Francesco Durante compositions and a work each from Pergolesi, Barbella and Leo. The music of both Durante and Pergolesi total more than that of Scarlatti’s, so how can the disc be marketed as a Scarlatti release?

This new release of Scarlatti sonatas played by the renowned pianist Vladimir Horowitz is a treasure of inestimable value. Listening to these timeless performances is among my greatest delights and it definitely belongs on a desert-island list of essential recordings.

A pianist of legendary fame and stature, Vladimir Horowitz was born in Kiev, Ukraine. His mother, herself a professional pianist, provided his first instruction at the piano and was the first to recognize his extraordinary talents; he studied further at the Kiev Conservatory. His first public appearance was a recital in Kiev on May 30, 1920, and in 1922 he gave a series of 15 concerts in Kharkov for which he was paid in food and clothing.

This disc received the 1998 Cannes Classical Music Awards for "Record of the Year" and "Best Instrumental Solo or Chamber Performance - 17th/18th Centuries." It also received the 1997 Gramophone magazine award for "Best Instrumental Recording," was Gramophone's "Recording of the Month" for May 1997, and was nominated for the 1998 Grammy Award for "Best Instrumental Soloist Performance (without Orchestra)."

Dominico Scarlatti: Love's Sweet Torment - Late Cantatas Vol 1 [IMPORT] Penelope Rapson (Conductor), Fiori Musicali (Orchestra), Kate Eckersley (Performer) is a beautifull recording with the talent Kate Eckersley. Her vocal skills are sublime and it truly sounds angelic when she sings. Unicorn-Kanchana Records have cheaped out completely on the book-let with a terrible font and it is truly paper thin. The essay written by Ms Eckersley is very well-written and informative. Over all this is a great production and I give it 5 well-deserved stars.

The son of Alessandro Scarlatti, who created a new school of opera in Naples, Domenico Scarlatti is particularly renowned for his remarkable keyboard sonatas, of which some 555 survive. Written for performance on the various keyboard instruments of the Spanish court, where Scarlatti was employed for many years, these astonishingly inventive and absorbing sonatas alternate between quick-witted virtuoso effects and deeply expressive lyricism.

This group of Domenico Scarlatti keyboard sonatas from an ongoing Naxos series presents what can fairly be called an old-fashioned approach to the composer's music, although that's not to say anything against it. The young Korean American pianist Soyeon Lee harks back to the times when pianists phrased Scarlatti a good deal like Mozart, who himself was viewed through the prism of Romanticism. In place of the percussive harpsichord rhythms and sharp contrasts of recent Scarlatti performances, you get pedal, gracefully shaped phrases, and a smoothing of the edges of Scarlatti's style.

Scarlatti's sonatas were originally entitled 'Essercizi' ('Exercises'), and their purpose was to provide musical études for the development of keyboard technique, primarily for his patroness, Queen Maria Barbara of Spain, who must have been a talented harpsichordist. In one of his published collections, he indicated that the Essercizi offer 'no profound Learning, but rather an ingenious Jesting with Art, to accomodate you to the Mastery of the Harpsichord.'

I will yield to no one in my admiration for Scarlatti's piano sonatas (he modestly called them 'Essercizi' ['Exercises']), have played many of them at the piano, and have many, many recordings of them, including the complete set done by harpsichordist Scott Ross, before his too-early death. Naxos is slowly issuing a series that will eventually comprise all 555 sonatas, and each issue features a different pianist. Evgeny Zarafiants is a pianist previously unknown to me.

Kudos to Naxos for the way it has handled its ongoing series covering Domenico's enormous body of keyboard sonatas: in a repertory only (at best) loosely divisible into chronological or stylistic groupings, they have opted instead to divide the sonatas up among different performers. The buyer gets to look at these miniature masterworks, which can be performed in so many different ways, through different lenses.

Making a career and some recordings in the USA, pianist Beatrice Long features as the fourth pianist to contribute a volume in the Naxos projected series of the complete sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti. The recording was made in 1996 but not issued until 2002. It will do little to enhance the reputation of the pianist, the series, or Scarlatti himself. There is drama, magic, grandeur and ingenuity aplenty in these single movement works, but little of it is projected here.

As the old saying goes, "the third time's the charm." This is indeed the third time the German label Accent has issued this coupling of Domenico Scarlatti's Stabat Mater with João Rodrigues Esteves' Missa a oito voces. The first time was in 1990, when the recording by Currende under the leadership of Erik van Nevel was new, and the second in 1998 as part of a box set containing this and several recordings by Concerto Palatino. No complaints here, though, as this is one of the finest discs Accent has to offer.

Domenico Scarlatti is a great composer disguised as a mediocre one. Part of the disguise is that he’s a formulaic miniaturist. It’s easy to dismiss his sonatas with the airy notion that if you’ve heard a few of them, you’ve heard them all. So pianists usually dispatch them as twee appetizers, played with a wink and a smirk, setting the table for meatier fare. But such dismissal dissolves under the sheer inventiveness of the sonatas. Like the protagonist in Ilse Aichinger’s “The Bound Man,” Scarlatti finds endless possibilities within his self-imposed confines.