Uploaded November 2015 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
- Composer: Giuseppe Domenico Scarlatti (26 October 1685 -- 23 July 1757)
- Performer: Vladimir Horowitz
- Year of recording: 1986 (Live at the Moscow recital)
Sonata for Harpsichord in B minor, K.87/L.33, probably written between 1730-1742.
Sprinkled amid Scarlatti's 555 keyboard sonatas are a handful that give no tempo indication in the score. Most are early works, as this B minor effort likely is. Preserved in the fourteenth Venice volume of the composer's sonatas, which bears the date 1742, it was most probably written some years before that time, perhaps in the 1730s, though it may actually date back considerably further still.
While it lacks a tempo marking, this Sonata is obviously meant to be paced like an Andante or Adagio. Some modern recordings of the work, like the Pogorelich on DG, list the tempo as Andante. In any event, the work opens with a slow, mournful theme played mostly in the middle register, but seeming to struggle toward the upper ranges of the keyboard. In its second subject the music does rise higher, as if achieving some sort of angelic comfort, but without dispelling its sense of sorrow. In the second half of the work Scarlatti, following his unique sonata structural pattern, subjects the material in the exposition to thematic development. Here the music remains melancholy and actually transforms relatively little, while taking on a somewhat more stately character. In the end, one must assess this short sonata as one of the composer's more profound early works, and is here played on the grand piano by Horowitz with great sensibility.
- Composer: Giuseppe Domenico Scarlatti (26 October 1685 -- 23 July 1757)
- Performer: Vladimir Horowitz
- Year of recording: 1986 (Live at the Moscow recital)
Sonata for Harpsichord in B minor, K.87/L.33, probably written between 1730-1742.
Sprinkled amid Scarlatti's 555 keyboard sonatas are a handful that give no tempo indication in the score. Most are early works, as this B minor effort likely is. Preserved in the fourteenth Venice volume of the composer's sonatas, which bears the date 1742, it was most probably written some years before that time, perhaps in the 1730s, though it may actually date back considerably further still.
While it lacks a tempo marking, this Sonata is obviously meant to be paced like an Andante or Adagio. Some modern recordings of the work, like the Pogorelich on DG, list the tempo as Andante. In any event, the work opens with a slow, mournful theme played mostly in the middle register, but seeming to struggle toward the upper ranges of the keyboard. In its second subject the music does rise higher, as if achieving some sort of angelic comfort, but without dispelling its sense of sorrow. In the second half of the work Scarlatti, following his unique sonata structural pattern, subjects the material in the exposition to thematic development. Here the music remains melancholy and actually transforms relatively little, while taking on a somewhat more stately character. In the end, one must assess this short sonata as one of the composer's more profound early works, and is here played on the grand piano by Horowitz with great sensibility.
