It has been a whole year since the first disc of Staier's Scarlatti series (which figured in my most recent ''Critics' Choice''—(CD) RD77224, 2/92), and I had been wondering when it was going to be followed up. Here is the second at last, and very welcome. Many good harpsichordists have recorded Scarlatti sonatas, but few convey such enormous joie de vivre as Staier, who conjures up a vivid image of a vivacious composer with an irresistible sparkling wit. His tremendous attack in the very first sonata here (Kk420), taken at a spanking pace, is guaranteed to make the most supine listener sit up, and for those with ears for tonalities, Scarlatti's way of getting from its tonic of C to the dominant is as uproarious as Belloc's revellers going to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head. For high-spirited sonatas there has been nothing to equal Staier since the old days of Valenti: witness the boisterous gaiety of Kk214 in D or that of Kk264 in E, which by bewildering SC sleight of hand on Scarlatti's part finds itself in D sharp within about 30 bars and in F minor in its second half.
As for Scarlatti's wilder Spanishries, such as Kk175 with its harmonic scrunches, probably not even the composer attacked them with greater incisiveness. Technically the whole of this programme, with all its cascading arpeggios, left-hand leaps and deftly fingered rapid repeated notes is impeccable, and when Scarlatti heads Kk218 con velocita Staier takes the fullest advantage of that instruction. Is it just my personal reaction that I find the slower pieces rather less convincing? The processional C major Kk132 strikes me as fundamentally too slow, and its rubatos and hesitations contrived; and the central pastoral 6/8 of Kk202 (which starts off as a 3/8 Vivo) also lags a bit. I am all for a certain flexibility, and Staier's occasional hold-ups as if in wonderment at some harmonic audacity are most telling, but Kk213 seems a little too free, and the rubatos in Kk461 sound whimsical. But not everyone may agree with me on this. The small extra ornamentation Staier adds from time to time gives a fresh and spontaneous air to this performance (though he goes a bit far in tarting up that most unlikely Gavotta in D minor, Kk64), and his few changes of registration are stylishly conceived and unobtrusively executed. This is certainly a disc all Scarlatti lovers should hear.`'