Soler Harpsichord Sonatas – Richard Lester

Every generation gets the Soler it needs, apparently, and right now we seem to need him a great deal. The little Catalan monk of El Escorial — composer, theorist, sometime tutor to a Bourbon infante who apparently drove him half mad — has become one of the more improbable growth stocks in the early keyboard repertoire. Barely two decades ago you had to hunt for him. Now there are cycles proliferating on three or four labels, played on instruments ranging from scholarly copies of eighteenth-century Spanish singles to, in one Naxos venture that still raises eyebrows in some quarters, a Steinway.

Richard Lester belongs to the older, harder church. No modern piano here, no pedal-assisted sentimentality. Just harpsichord, dry Iberian air, and a player who has spent much of his career quietly becoming one of the more persuasive Soler advocates on disc without ever quite achieving Belder-level ubiquity.

That may be a good thing. Ubiquity breeds routine, and Soler resists routine at every turn. The thirteen sonatas assembled here move with a restlessness that never settles into any single idiom. You get the guitar-haunted dance sonatas, all rasgueado strumming translated into arpeggiated left-hand figures, and then, a few tracks later, something that could almost pass for Haydn dressed in a mantilla. The Sonata in C, M.27, stretched to nine minutes, is the closest thing to a set-piece here, spacious and almost symphonic in its unfolding. Lester lets it breathe without indulging it, which is harder than it sounds.

Compare him with Scarlatti, as everyone must. Soler invites it, having likely studied with the old Neapolitan expatriate himself, or at least absorbed his manner through Madrid’s court air. But where Scarlatti’s four hundred and fifty-some sonatas circle obsessively around certain harmonic and gestural tics — those hand-crossings, those acciaccaturas — Soler is stranger, less predictable, occasionally downright reckless. The Sonata in C sharp minor, R.21, unspools nearly six and a half minutes of harmonic wandering that sounds, at moments, unmoored from its own century. “The devil in monk’s clothing” is the old epithet, unfair to actual devils probably, but you take the point after a few of these tracks.

Lester’s touch is unfussy. He does not overpedal the rhetoric — there is no pedal to overuse, of course, but I mean the temptation toward exaggerated rubato, toward turning every ornament into an event. He lets the instrument’s natural decay do rhetorical work that a lesser player might try to manufacture through artificial emphasis. In the dance sonatas — R.86, R.110, G.43 — there’s a wonderful sense of physical gesture, of feet actually moving, without any loss of harpsichord discipline. In the slower, more cante hondo-adjacent pieces (his word, not mine, and a slightly precious one at that) he finds real vocal weight, phrases that seem to sigh rather than simply decorate.

The Boccherini interloper is a curiosity and nothing more. Lester’s own transcription of the Fandango from the Guitar Quintet in D, G. 448, played here with David Ponsford at a second harpsichord, is pleasant enough but essentially beside the point — a novelty appended, one suspects, to round out the timing. The original, with its castanets and guitar and that unmistakable percussive snap, does something two harpsichords simply cannot replicate. The transfer loses the visceral clatter that makes the piece function at all. Curious listeners should seek out Lester’s other Nimbus disc, paired with Carlos Seixas, where Soler gets his own, far more idiomatic Fandango.

Nimbus’s engineering is up to house standard: warm, close without being claustrophobic, faithful to whatever instrument Ponsford has hauled into the studio (the notes dote on his period instruments rather more than they do on poor Boccherini, who gets short shrift generally). Minor inconsistencies of level crop up across what is, after all, a compilation drawn from different sessions, but nothing to trouble the ear seriously.

Does the world need another Soler disc? On this evidence, yes — at least this one. Lester plays like a man who has lived with these pieces rather than merely learned them, and that lived-in quality shows in a hundred small decisions: a slightly clipped final chord here, a breath taken before an unexpected modulation there. Not a library-defining set, perhaps, but an unusually intelligent and warm-hearted one.