Bach - Scarlatti: A Dialogue 300 Years After
Polina Osetinskaya’s new CD released on Firma Melodiya alternates works by Johann Sebastian Bach and Domenico Scarlatti. Two composers born in the same year. But they never met.
The CD contains five Scarlatti’s sonatas and J.S. Bach’s Italian Concerto and chorales transcribed for the piano by Alexander Siloti, Egon Petri and Wilhelm Kempff.
Polina Osetinskaya: The idea was to connect the Italian flesh with the German religious spirit. The album was conceived as a dialogue, in which Scarlatti poses questions, affirming something from a human point of view, while Bach, as a messiah, preaches and speaks. (“Musical Life”, 2019).
Bach and Scarlatti. Both were born in 1685. Both came from the celebrated musical dynasties in their respective countries. During their lifetime, both achieved prominence as outstanding harpsichord and organ players; their clavier works had a profound influence on contemporaries and the subsequent epoch (of course, Bach’s influence was immeasurably greater), although the artistic interests of both were not limited to the keyboard instruments. But both never met and probably did not know each other's music...
Polina Osetinskaya's performing art is known for unusual programmes and paradoxical and, at the same time, deeply considered juxtaposition of composers’ names, styles and ages. Apart from the Italian Concerto, in which the Great Cantor paid a tribute to the Italian tradition of harpsichord music, his Protestant chorales and polyphonic cycles written in the Baroque age seemed endlessly distant from Domenico Scarlatti’s sonatas with their exuberant southern, Neapolitan temperament and joyful vigour of motility. But today we look at them differently. Amazingly, modern culture not only smoothed their musical ‘contradiction’, but also allowed us to hear a certain commonality and unity in this music. The unity of unhurried contemplation about the fleeting life and the eternity of being – something that a modern man lacks so badly.
