Search - Anne Queffélec :: Scarlatti: Sonatas

Artful, Sensitive Playing

David J. Friedlander | Columbus, Ohio United States | 02/12/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Anne Quellefec is a top level artist with a highly intelligent understanding of the keyboard works of D. Scarlatti. Her playing is wonderfully sensitive and expressive and she brings out the mysteries of Scarlatti's landmark keyboard pieces.



Scarlatti's output of keyboard works are all one movement affairs. He called them "excercizes" although Etudes might be a more accurate musical terminology for them. They require advanced techniques to play them properly including hand-crossing, rapid repetitions and lightning passage work. All of this is tossed off effortlessly by Quellefec, though never in a way that glosses over the expressive qualities embedded in these quite unique pieces. I have always been a Murray Perahia fan and he played several of the better known Scarlatti pieces on his well received Sony release several years ago. K27 is an especially rich piece with a lot of poetic possibilities to it. Well Perahia plays it very well but Quellefec trumps him clearly. She really mines the mood and beauty from the piece with great subtlety. She always puts the attention on the music, is never showy and has great concentration at the keyboard.



This is highly interesting and absorbing music, extremely well played and beautifully recorded. It is art on the highest level and I recommend this recording wholeheartedly and without any reservation whatsoever. 5 full stars out of 5."

A good Scarlatti recital from 1970 - but short TT

Discophage | France | 10/12/2008

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Born in 1948 and the daughter and sister of two noted writers, Anne Queffélec is a French pianist who enjoyed some notoriety in the early 1970s in the wake of her success at the Munich and Leeds competition (although her recording career didn't really develop thereafter as could have been expected), and this Scarlatti recital, recorded in 1970 for Erato, was her first recording. It is as good an interpretation as any. Queffélec has all the dazzling pyrotechnics required in the faster pieces yet with enough dynamic nuances, but more commendable still is that she never romanticizes the slower and more pensive ones, and her touch remains always clear. Her selection of 13 Sonatas picks mainly among the more popular ones (which, given the scope of the competition, could work against it), and the 1970 sonics have held up very well. So the only real drawback of this disc is that the original LP's TT of 51 minute fills only 2/3rds of the capacity of a CD. So find it priced accordingly.



Her Ravel Concertos from the same era are also worth hearing: Ravel: Piano Concertos or Ravel: Piano Concertos; Debussy: Fantasie for Piano & Orchestra."

One of the best recordings of Scarlatti on piano

a listener | Springfield, IL | 03/11/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is a truly classic recording of a well-chosen selection of Scarlatti Sonatas, rivaling some of the best piano accounts (Horowitz, Tipo, Pletnev, etc.) If you love Scarlatti or great piano playing, you must have this vivid and poetic recording."