Almost all I knew about this Georgian pianist, now teaching in the USA, was that she had been the winner at the Montreal Competition and had recorded a disc of Zez Confrey pieces (Marco Polo, 5/99). It therefore came as a surprise to find a newcomer entrusted with the first disc in the mammoth undertaking of what is announced as Scarlatti’s complete keyboard sonatas (which took 34 discs in Scott Ross’s harpsichord integrale for Erato, 6/88 – nla). There is no hint of what plan she may be adopting from this first higgledy-piggledy collection, rejecting even the coupled-pairs theory and apparently totally arbitrary; but she does at least give Kirkpatrick’s, Longo’s and Pestelli’s numberings (though not Fadini’s) to enable us to identify them all. At first everything seems excellent: neat, crystal-clear articulation with minimal use of pedal, the most precise ornaments, subtle, unexaggerated phrasing and dynamics, in fastish movements springily light vitality with a real sense of fun and the ‘jesting with art’ to which Scarlatti confessed, and in slow ones a reflective tranquillity – in short, if we are to have Scarlatti on the piano (and there’s little reason why not except for the loss of the harpsichord’s castanet-like rattle on repeated notes, as in Kk421) this is as good as it is possible to get. She hops about gleefully in Kk523, and her buoyant left-hand octaves in Kk44, Kk434 and Kk487 are particularly delightful.
But at times her tempos are perverse: there is no justification for taking Kk8 Largo when it’s marked Allegro; it is true that Kk427 is marked ‘as fast as possible’, but this madcap speed would not have been possible on the instrument for which it was written; on the other hand, her cautious-sounding Kk450 could scarcely be called Allegrissimo. Unfortunately the disc is badly flawed by what seems to be technical trouble. At half-way through Kk544 the pitch suddenly sags by almost a tone (the fact that the speed drops too suggests a technical failure of some kind rather than a different take): this lower pitch persists for the next four sonatas before things are righted. Did no one in Naxos check this conspicuous accident? One can only wish Eteri Andjaparidze better luck in future.'