Sinfonia in E major

Scarlatti père occupies a strange historiographical position: enormously influential in his own time, largely overshadowed in posterity by his more famous son Domenico and by the colossal figures of Bach and Handel who were his contemporaries. This Sinfonia in E major has the clean, forward momentum of Italian Baroque instrumental writing at its most confident — the major key gives it a brightness, and the three-movement structure moves through its tempos with the efficiency of music that knows exactly what it wants to accomplish. Alessandro Scarlatti was instrumental in establishing the Italian overture form that would eventually become the classical symphony, and there's something interesting in hearing a direct ancestor of that form. The string writing is idiomatic and graceful, the harmonic language clear and purposeful. It lacks the emotional complexity of his son's keyboard works or the architectural ambition of Bach's orchestral suites, but within its more modest aims it achieves a genuine elegance. This is music for a specific kind of pleasure: the pleasure of something well-made doing exactly what it sets out to do, no more. You'd encounter it in a concert of early Italian chamber music and find yourself more engaged than expected by its unassuming clarity.