Patrizia Ciofi, Anna Bonitatibus, Il Complesso Barocco, Alan Curtis - Scarlatti: Lettere Amorose (2003)

Domenico Scarlatti’s chamber cantatas are not entirely unknown to modern ears, but it is a close-run thing. That seems an extraordinary situation for a composer whose keyboard sonatas have so long been part of the furniture, and owes its existence to two old saws: that Scarlatti wrote almost exclusively for the harpsichord once he had left Italy for Portugal and Spain in 1719; and that his vocal works have nothing of the personal imprint of his sonatas. In fact, neither is true, as these two discs show. Both contain rarely-heard cantatas for solo voice, two violins and continuo, which were not only composed in Spain but also throw off such familiar Scarlatti sparks as chirruping repetitions, nagging dissonances, bizarre melodic leaps and mercurial major-minor shifts. To hear them in the light of attachment to texts – and texts with an immediacy that Schubert would have appreciated, by the way – is fascinating.
By contrast, Il Complesso Barocco have built their programme around the fact that the texts of their three cantatas take the form of letters between two warring lovers, and by allocating them to different singers and linking them with harpsichord sonatas they make the whole thing into a sort of cantata-cycle. This is clever, and while it does not quite come off as a concept (too many sonatas for that!), the resulting mix of genres is certainly attractive.