L'Oiseau-Lyre Florilegium's title for this disc is ''Virtuoso Sonatas and Fandangos from eighteenth-century Spain'': if not quite all the items merit the initial adjective, this is more than compensated for by the two Scarlatti sonatas, with their manic cross-hands leaps and skips and (in Kk119) brazen note-clusters and swirling trills, and more particularly by the Soler Fandango, one of the most remarkable and sensational works in the entire repertoire of the harpsichord. It is in essence an over-12-minute passacaglia on a two-bar ground, the melodic figures showing an extraordinary richness of invention, while the constant harmonic repetition builds up tension to fever pitch.
Unfortunately Puyana, showy player that he is, cannot resist the temptation to tart things up by additional treatments of his own, thus masking Soler's astonishing audacity. And he has chosen to play the work—like half the programme here—on a giant three-manual, six-register Hass instrument of 1740 (of a type he tries to convince us was not unknown in Spain) which enables him to 'orchestrate' the music by constant changes of registration, in a way fashionable among harpsichordists 40 years ago, and to clump about in 16-foot-reinforced grand jeu. His many changes of tempo and applications of heavy rubato are surely at odds with the essence of the fandango, which should relentlessly forge forward at a steady pace until the final frenetic speeding-up. (Was this perhaps recorded piecemeal? That would explain things.) The Fandango by 'Signor Scarlate' (discovered in 1984 in an eighteenth-century collection) is most probably spurious: mechanically repetitive, lacking in invention, and played here without fire.
For the Scarlatti and Soler sonatas Puyana, tempted by the Hass's possibilities, again adopts an 'orchestrated' approach, and in Kk119 exploits crashing 16-foot tone. In Soler's more classical Sonata-rondon he inserts a cadenza of his own. Of the rest of the programme, mostly by nearly unknown clerics, the Larranaga (rather Haydnesque in style) is lively; the Galles (played on a single-manual Spanish harpsichord of c. 1720, and much more acceptable in sound) has character and is in fandango rhythm; the Oxinaga is a brisk march which Puyana treats with French inegalites; only the Sostoa is disappointingly conventional except for one unexpected key-change. But perhaps the most interesting is the dark-toned sonata by Blasco de Nebra, organist of Seville Cathedral: his set of six (c. 1780) was designated for harpsichord or fortepiano, and the series of skipping tenths in both hands in the second movement of this F sharp minor work seems particularly suited to the latter instrument.
Listeners with perfect pitch will need to make some adjustment to their ears: while three of the harpsichords employed are tuned to the now familiar pitch about a semitone below today's norm, the Hass monster is a whole tone lower. The recorded quality of the disc (made in 1985 in Rafael Puyana's Paris apartment) is excellent.'