Before listeners knew the names of any other pre-Classical composer of keyboard music, they knew that of Baldassarre Galuppi thanks to Robert Browning's metrically daring poem "A Toccata of Galuppi's" ("Was a lady such a lady, cheeks so round and lips so red/On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-flower on its bed/O'er the breast's superb abundance where a man might base his head?"). With the thorough exploration of the output of Scarlatti, Galuppi's star dimmed somewhat. His style did not have the close focus of ...
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Before listeners knew the names of any other pre-Classical composer of keyboard music, they knew that of Baldassarre Galuppi thanks to Robert Browning's metrically daring poem "A Toccata of Galuppi's" ("Was a lady such a lady, cheeks so round and lips so red/On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-flower on its bed/O'er the breast's superb abundance where a man might base his head?"). With the thorough exploration of the output of Scarlatti, Galuppi's star dimmed somewhat. His style did not have the close focus of Scarlatti's, but Italian keyboardist Luca Guglielmi makes a virtue of that in this well-recorded Belgian release. The nine short Galuppi sonatas recorded here were composed between the mid-1750s and 1781 (the latest is the Sonata in C minor, Sonata III, "Passatiempo al Cembalo," which is a rather serious work despite its subtitle). They have from one to three movements, and they're stylistically all over the 18th century map. Some resemble Scarlatti, some have simpler textures with...
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