Scarlatti and the Neapolitan Song – Calandra, Pasotti, C

Naples gets under a performer’s skin whether he wants it there or not — the noise of the harbor, the street vendors, the funerary bells competing with mandolins. Domenico Scarlatti spent his boyhood there, son of Alessandro, and then decamped for Rome, Lisbon, and finally Madrid, where he wrote the 555 sonatas that made him immortal and largely forgot, on paper anyway, where he came from. This new disc argues he never really left home at all.

It is a lovely conceit, and mostly it works. Letizia Calandra, Michele Pasotti, and harpsichordist Francesco Cera have assembled a sequence that alternates keyboard sonatas with Neapolitan songs — some traditional, some by identifiable composers like Leonardo Vinci and Pergolesi, one attributed (dubiously, I think) to Sant’Alfonso de Liguori. The idea is to let the ear do what musicology cannot always prove: hear the kinship.

And you do hear it. Put the Sonata in G, K. 153, next to “Facimmo mo l’amore,” and the triplet lilt, the harmonic simplicity dressed up in ornament — it clicks into place almost embarrassingly easily. Cera plays with a clean, unfussy touch, none of the pearly legato that Horowitz brought to this repertoire (glorious in its way, but a different aesthetic entirely, more nineteenth-century salon than Neapolitan tavern). Cera’s instrument has bite. The registration is sometimes a little dry for my taste, but dryness has its virtues here — it lets the guitar strums of Pasotti register as commentary rather than clutter.

Calandra’s voice is bright, slightly reedy at the top, well suited to this material even if it wouldn’t fill a house much larger than a good-sized parlor. She sings the dialect with evident relish — you don’t need the untranslated Neapolitan text (a real deficiency in the booklet, English speakers left adrift) to catch the wink in “Chi disse ca la femmena.” Pergolesi’s tune has a swagger that anticipates opera buffa by a generation, all quick repeated notes and comic hiccups.

The centerpiece, at least conceptually, is “Quanno nascette Ninno,” the pastoral carol whose siciliano lilt Scarlatti seems to lift almost wholesale into K. 513 — the “Pastorale” sonata, though it isn’t included on this program, oddly, given how central the argument is. We get instead K. 174 in C minor, dark and stormy, paired with the melancholic canzona “La nova gelosia.” The connective tissue is more a matter of mood than melody — Scarlatti absorbing affetti rather than quoting tunes outright — and the liner notes don’t always distinguish between these two very different kinds of influence. When they claim Sant’Alfonso composed his carol in the “early 1700s,” somebody wasn’t doing arithmetic; the man was born in 1696, and would have been a child hawking gelosia melodies out of the cradle if that dating held.

None of which sinks the disc. Scholarship aside, this is a program built on ears, and the sequencing is smart — sonatas breaking up songs, songs illuminating sonatas, so you never quite settle into either mode. The K. 9 in D minor, one of the most recorded of all Scarlatti’s sonatas (Horowitz again, Pogorelich, even Landowska on her thundering Pleyel), sounds newly strange stripped of its usual context and placed beside a mournful street tune. That’s the disc’s achievement: not proving influence, which nobody could really prove, but making you hear these familiar sonatas as Neapolitan music that happened to end up in Madrid.

Recommended, with the caveat that you’ll want a second reference for the sonatas alone — Pinnock or Ross for modern harpsichord elegance, Horowitz if you want heresy and don’t mind it. But for this particular argument, sonata as street song’s shadow, nobody else has made the case so persuasively.