Domenico Scarlatti’s genius as a harpsichordist and writer for the instrument has obscured the fact that there were other composers in Spain and Portugal at the time, or shortly afterwards, whose music has received less attention than it merits; and Sophie Yates does well to set him in his milieu. His fascination with the popular instruments and dances he heard around him is well known, and is conspicuous in Kk119, with its rattle of castanets and extraordinary chordal scrunches. But he was not alone in this: the Basque choirmaster Larranaga’s D minor Sonata is equally flamboyant, delighting in similar scrunches. Almost Scarlatti’s equal as a virtuoso – indeed, when he asked Scarlatti for lessons, the latter replied that he himself should be the pupil – was Seixas, his junior by almost 20 years, organist at the royal chapel in Lisbon. The four sonatas of his included here (two with brief minuets following the main movement) are extremely brilliant – No. 7 of a wildness worthy of Scarlatti at his peak, the more extensive No. 5 a fine movement. (Odd how the key of D minor brought out the best in composers!) We could do with more Seixas.
Albero, a Navarrese who became royal organist in Spain in 1748 and was one of the copyists of Scarlatti’s sonatas, is less bold in the pieces presented here (not, perhaps, the best choices?): more remarkable are the recercatas and gigantic fugues he wrote, which no one has yet recorded. The Fandango by Soler is as astonishing as anything in the Spanish keyboard repertoire, and Sophie Yates, playing a copy of a Giusti instrument of 1679, has the nimbleness to deal confidently with its virtuoso demands (which include hand-crossings of fearsome rapidity); but while herself stating that a fandango ‘maintains a constant sense of tension’, she spoils it all by indulging in numerous rubatos and changes of pace that are quite uncalled-for and inappropriate, and repeating the introduction as a coda instead of leaving the work in mid-air on the dominant chord, as she should. Scarlatti’s Kk263 and Kk492 are likewise subjected to big rubatos and variable speeds that merely sound mannered. A great pity. The recording is good except for Kk119, where more forward presence was needed to give incisiveness to detail, here rather blurred.'