Andrea Bacchetti - Galuppi: Piano Sonatas (2008)

Baldassare Galuppi was a Venetian composer, mainly noted for his large output in opera and his collaborations with Goldoni who wrote many a libretto for him, some of which that were re-used by subsequent composers (like Il Mondo della Luna and Haydn). His dates - 1706 -1785 - make him part of a later generation than Bach, Vivaldi, Haendel and Scarlatti but of an older one than Haydn and Mozart, and roughly a contemporary of Bach's two eldest sons - Wilhelm-Friedemann and Carl-Philipp-Emmanuel.

The Sonatas featured here are performed in a new edition from the original sources (usually contemporary copies rather than original manuscripts) by Mario Marcarini (who wrote the liner notes) and pianist Andrea Bacchetti (born in Genoa in 1977). Apparently, none can be dated with certainty. Stylistically, some are closer to the Scarlatti model and sound, both the slow and the fast movements, as if they could be late offshoots of Scarlatti Sonatas (1 to 5, track 11), and some sound like they could come out of a Haydn Sonata (6 to 9 for instance). Track 10, the first movement of Sonata in a-minor, is a simple Siciliana that sounds as if it could pre-date Bach (Johann Sebastian, I mean). The two last Sonatas showcased on the CD offer the interesting peculiarity of sharing the same final presto - once made famous by Arturo Benedetti-Michelangeli, who made it one of his favored encores (Vol. 1: The Early Recordings). This shared movement is an effect of the unscrupulous habits of the publisher in those days, to cull and publish new works from the compilation of the most popular movements of other Sonatas, and in the present case the sources don't allow to establish which is the original version. Bachetti commendably varies the interpretation to suit the character of its respective first movement.