Yevgeny Sudbin made his debut for BIS 10 years ago with a collection of Domenico Scarlatti’s keyboard sonatas. As he points out in his sleeve notes for this new collection, playing the 555 Scarlatti sonatas that survive is still an integral part of the training of every pianist who grows up in the Russian tradition, and Sudbin’s performances are very much in the mould of Vladimir Horowitz’s famous recordings and those by Mikhail Pletnev from the 1990s. Like them, Sudbin makes no apology for using the full tonal resources that a modern Steinway can offer in works composed for the harpsichord; playing the sonatas on a piano, he says, is effectively equivalent to making piano transcriptions of the originals, and the range of keyboard colour and pedal effects he conjures up for his selection is consistently dazzling. At times, his performances almost amount to recompositions; the ways in which he varies textures in repeats, applies ornaments and even transposes lines by an octave to make textures clearer can seem shocking, but the musicality and peerless pianism with which everything is done makes this a hugely attractive disc, even if purists will still want to hear these works played on a harpsichord.
