If you liked the Seixas Concerto in A (Hungaroton/Conifer (CD) HCD12392, 11/87), you'll love these sonatas. Playing on one of the few surviving eighteenth-century Portuguese harpsichords (part of the famed Finchcocks Collection in Kent) Robert Woolley brings the music vividly to life. The sound of the instrument grows on the listener as one listens—it has both French and Italian characteristics which enhance the polarized textures of Seixas's music. For those players and listeners not acquainted with Domenico Scarlatti's Portuguese contemporary, this recording can but give impetus to the widening of his reputation.
If virtuosity is always on display, it is never vacuous, Carlos Seixas was enough of a composer never to lose-direction. There are rhetorical moments (such as the Allegro of the first D minor Sonata) and others of harmonic piquancy, yet for all the originality of the figuration (as for example in the concluding movements of the first three sonatas on this CD), amusement at his use of left-hand octaves palls after several sonatas like the A major, the single-movement D minor (with 'blood and thunder' effects) and the B flat major (a special commendation for the tuner, David Winston, would seem to be in order). Taken on their own, they are very exciting and delightful works.
Woolley, Seixas's gallant champion, is more than equal to any task contrived by the composer and there are many moments of sparkling technical virtuosity—especially in the concluding G minor Sonata—as well as interpretative skill evident in his thoughtful performances of the E flat major Sonata and the Andante of the C minor. This is a recording for fellow enthusiasts and those eager to broaden their experience of late-baroque music—but especially for those who relish dazzling playing on the harpsichord.'