This is a thoroughly satisfying essay on the possibilities of a connection between the keyboard works of Joseph Haydn and Domenico Scarlatti. Geographically, and chronologically, the possibility that Scarlatti influenced Haydn seems at first remote. Haydn was born in 1732 and by 1733 Scarlatti was installed in Madrid, music master to Princess Maria Barbara. But while the bulk of Scarlatti’s sonatas were not published at the time, some of them certainly travelled and were widely admired, and in a cogent booklet essay, Elaine Sisman argues for multiple vectors whereby the binary-form works of the Italian master may have made their way under the nose of the young Austrian composer: through the poet and librettist Metastasio, the composer and singing teacher Porpora and the celebrated castrato Farinelli, among others, including lesser-known musical savants who circulated throughout Europe and had contact with Haydn in Vienna.

Even sceptics, however, will be convinced by Olivier Cavé’s compelling musical demonstration of harmonic, textural, inventive and temperamental affinities between the two musicians. Sudden changes to the minor key, striking contrasts in the thickness of sonority, irregular phrases and periodicity, and a shared indulgence of pure eccentricity recur throughout the works of both composers, who are each represented by five works (three sonatas, a partita and divertimento by Haydn, and five sonatas by Scarlatti). Cavé’s touch and sensibility tend to elide differences between the two composers, while his crisp, sensible and unfussy ornamentation immediately distinguishes the Scarlatti works (grounded in the harpsichord) from the latter, more plastically expressive Haydn.

Cavé’s readings are fluent and natural, and even when tempi are fast (as in the Haydn sonatas in D major, HobXVI/37, and F major, HobXVI/23, and the Scarlatti Sonata in G major, Kk432) they are never frantic. Passagework, ornamentation and fleet accompaniment figures flow with ease, dispatched with clarity and liquid tone. Delights abound: the brief but subtle flirtation with imitative figures in the Scarlatti Sonata in E major, Kk495; the pathos of the Adagio from the Haydn F major Sonata; the uncharacteristically lush tone the pianist adopts for the final work on the disc, the early Scarlatti Sonata in B flat major, Kk128.

If Haydn absorbed anything from a possible encounter with the music of Scarlatti, it was likely a sense of permission, the freedom to indulge ideas with spontaneity and a quicksilver turn of mind. And even if one doubts any connection at all, Cave’s sparkling performance argues for a kinship of spirits that transcends influence or contact.