Harpsichordist Richard Lester, apparently with energies left over from his fine traversal of Scarlatti's entire keyboard sonata oeuvre, turns here to two of Scarlatti's students with enjoyable results. Carlos Seixas (1704-1742) was even more prolific than his teacher; he wrote about 700 sonatas, but most were lost in the disastrous Lisbon earthquake of 1755, so violent that it spawned a tsunami and exposed the bottom of the sea. His surviving works clearly deserve wider exposure. Seixas and the more familiar Padre Antonio ...
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Harpsichordist Richard Lester, apparently with energies left over from his fine traversal of Scarlatti's entire keyboard sonata oeuvre, turns here to two of Scarlatti's students with enjoyable results. Carlos Seixas (1704-1742) was even more prolific than his teacher; he wrote about 700 sonatas, but most were lost in the disastrous Lisbon earthquake of 1755, so violent that it spawned a tsunami and exposed the bottom of the sea. His surviving works clearly deserve wider exposure. Seixas and the more familiar Padre Antonio Soler each inherited an aspect of Scarlatti's genius, with Seixas carrying forward Scarlatti's innovative formal thinking, while Soler explored the fiery and characteristically Iberian effects that tend to get lost in decorous performances of Scarlatti's music. These are a strong point of Lester's vigorous playing, and with Soler's possibly spurious but enjoyable-in-any-event Fandango (track 22) the program ends with a bang. The seven Seixas pieces include four that are essentially...
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