Scarlatti described his sonatas as ''an ingenious jesting with art'' and Blandine Verlet once said to me, ''You don't play Scarlatti, you play with him''; in enjoying the 'wood' of jesting one may lose sight of the 'trees' of the art and ingenuity, but Maggie Cole does not. Four Kirkpatrick pairs and as many singletons vividly cross-section this remarkable corpus of music: the brilliance, fire, grace, sobriety, good humour, and the 'Spanishness' of rhythm and cadence evident in many of the here-chosen dozen. There is at least one surprise (and every surprise is not a joke) in each one—small ones like the lombardic rhythms in bar 84 of Kk550 and the three-bar phrases at the start of Kk380, and bigger ones such as the startling modulations in Kk264, 318 and 319—and after each pause in Kk141, where will he go next! Needless to say, there is also a generous helping of the outrageous demands he makes on technique, none of which could be deduced from Cole's performances. Two fine instruments are used (one per side): a Kirckman of 1756 and a reproduction of a Ruckers of 1638 by Adlam Burnett, and harpsichords have seldom been better recorded. In his sleeve-note LS says that in view of the excursions into remote keys ''a hypothesis of some sort of equal temperament would seem justified''—one such is employed and the results justify it. Cole is a harpsichordist and musician of the highest quality; if you don't already know this, it's high time you found it out via this and her previous solo recording (Hyperion), offering (if this be needed) a similar revelation on Scarlatti's behalf.'