Gerald Ranck

Gerald RANCK began to play the Scarlatti sonatas (Kk 1-30) at 3 in the afternoon of May 10. He took a short intermission after Sonata 18 and at 5:35 he finished Kk 30--superb musical judgment, because the G-minor is played at moderate speed, and so left the audience with a lyrical decompressant after the furies that came immediately before.

It isn't easy to communicate the hair-raising complexity of so many of the Scarlatti sonatas. There is little to be said for trying to compete with the description of them done by the late

Ralph Kirkpatrick, an interpreter and a biographer of Domenico Scarlatti. He wrote:

Iberian and Italian elements appear to be almost equally balanced. Some of the pieces are as dry and bony as any sun-baked Mediterranean landscape. Others alternate lyric echoes of Italian opera and mock tears in descending chromatics with scherzando leaps and arpeggios. In some sonatas the brittle tensions and intoxicating rhythms of the Spanish dance are heightened by the wail of a harsh flamenco voice accompanied by guitars and castanets and punctuated by shouts of ole and the cross accents of stamping feet. A sonata like Kk 20 recalls the orchestras of small Spanish towns with their shrill wind instruments: breathy over-blown flutes, squealing provincial oboes, and percussive basses like tight drums, almost like cannon shots. Sometimes in others a jangling of tambourines is interrupted by a resounding thump of the guitar. There is no limit to the imaginary sounds evoked by Scarlatti's harpsichord. Many of them extend far beyond the domain of musical instruments into an impressionistic transcription of the sounds of daily life: of street cries, church bells, tapping of dancing feet, fireworks, artillery, in such varied and fluid form that any attempt to describe them precisely in words results in colorful and embarrassing nonsense.

The auspices that Sunday afternoon were the New York Society for Ethical Culture (2 West 64th Street), with its perfect chamber auditorium, which seats about seven hundred. The occasion? Well, historic. Because Gerald Ranck is undertaking something never before done so far as we know. When the series is completed he will have performed all of Scarlatti's sonatas, of which there are--555. His next concert will be on September 13, and thereafter he will play once every month, September to May, for three years. This summer he will need to master 250 sonatas. This is on the order of undertaking, by Labor Day, to memorize the Old Testament.

New York is a funny place. On the one hand you can't imagine an enterprise on so heroic a scale being undertaken anywhere else. Perhaps it is for this reason that the city is blase, well, beyond forgiveness. There were exactly ninety people there to hear, and to be transfixed by, the overwhelming music described by Kirkpatrick, and to be awed by the modest superartist, with his great blond beard, who performed feats that would dizzy a mainframe computer. And there was zero mention of the event in that morning's 687-page New York Times. So-what time, the cultural overseers of New York life seemed to be saying about a musical feat never before undertaken.

There are lots of people in greater New York who love the special music made by a harpsichord; but not many who will actually get up to go to a harpsichord concert. What they do is listen to the harpsichord on records, and over the radio. The life of a harpsichord musician in the late twentieth century tells what life must have been like for almost all musicians in the eighteenth century. Bach, Handel, and Scarlatti all were born in 1685, the most momentous coincidence since the death on the same day of Shakespeare and Cervantes. Johann Sebastian Bach probably didn't draw larger audiences than Gerald Ranck, except when playing in church, to which the people came not because they loved Bach but because they feared the Lord.

Gerald Ranck has dedicated his series to Sylvia Marlowe and Fernando Valenti. Sylvia Marlowe was in the tradition of Wanda Landowska and Jimmy Durante, a great showman (showperson?). But even she didn't permit herself much more than one or two recitals in great big cosmopolitan New York, where if you want a crowd, it makes sense to be Pavarotti or Horowitz. Fernando Valenti died broke and forgotten. I would be surprised if there is a harpsichordist in America who makes a living on the safe side of the poverty line. What they need to do is to teach, or to make records; or both.

It is a most awful pity, because people who can hear and who are receptive to musical magic, and can appreciate spellbinding virtuosity, simply do not know what they are missing, and they are not going to find out about it from the New York Times (though come to think of it, I published an essay there a few years ago on harpsichord music). The happy few can only rejoice that there is a little band out there who devote their lives to enthralling the ninety-odd people who attend their concerts.

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