CLEMENTI: Sonatas Op. 3, 4, 14 & 36 [CD de audio] S.Lorenzi, G. Gorini and Clementi

In 1977, Leon B. Plantinga stated that almost anyone who has studied the piano in the Western world during the last half century knows one or more Sonatinas. This may be slightly less true now, but Clementi's career as a composer, editor and entrepreneur within the nascent field of piano making ensured his near-universal popularity to a degree that other composers of perhaps greater genius but more local flavor did not. they reached The easy flow of its melodies and its supremely natural fit for its instrument, as well as Clementi's encyclopedic understanding of what this fortepiano and later pianoforte could do, and how players of any skill level could stretch and improve on it, mean that his name as one of the first significant composers for the piano, and not just the keyboard, will live on forever. One of the main domestic genres that Clementi cultivated at the height of its commercialization between the 1780s and early 1800s was the accompanied sonata, a mainstay of the living room and a stability of publishers' catalogs until the early 19th century. (Dorothy de Val), and that is what we find on CD3 of this collection with the Op.4 sonatas, originally conceived with an accompaniment for violin or flute, but here presented as piano solos. The Op.3 sonatas are genuine duets, and lie somewhere between the Sonatinas and accompanied sonatas and Clementi's larger scale works. The two Italian musicians on this album formed a long-established duo partnership, during the middle years of the last century, who performed and recorded all the great works of the genre, from Clementi to Busoni and Shostakovich.