Glen Wilson's recording of Bach's 48 received a fair modicum of approval from NA in these columns (4/90); but between Bach and Scarlatti, exact contemporaries as they were, there is a whole world of difference. The gravitas apt for the former, in the small stiff courts of Germany, is quite out of place for the latter, surrounded as he was by the colourful everyday life of the Spanish people: he needs to sparkle. There is no question about Wilson's technical skill: his leaps up and down the keyboard are agile and accurate (as in Kk27 and 299) and he manages the dizzyingly cross-handed Kk120 without a qualm—at least I suppose he does, for one needs to see the acrobatics of this sonata in action; but except in this last and in Kk119 (with its wild toneclusters) I don't get a sense of joy or of charm in his playing, which has an academic and unspon-taneous flavour (and only in the second half of Kk69 does he venture the slightest decoration on a repeat).
His prestissimo in Kk545 is decidedly sober (and doesn't he feel the heady abandon of those stamping octave basses?), and his ponderously slow Cat's fugue (Kk30) is downright boring. At one extreme, as in Kk113 and Kk463, he is rigid and unimaginative; on the other, in Kk474, he is so very free that the music is almost in danger of losing its shape; between the two, he can be reasonably flexible (as in Kk69 and 187) but somehow still sounds stolid. In the expressive B minor Sonata Kk87 I find his stodginess hard to take and his perpetual mannered non-synchronization of hands increasingly irritating. Nor is the tone of his instrument, a copy of a Gregorio of 1726, very ingratiating, being thin and wiry. Compare this disc with the vitality of Andreas Staier's Deutsche Harmonia Mundi recordings of Scarlatti (2/92 and 3/93), and you'll see why I am disappointed.'