From the earliest woolgathering stage of this project I’ve been pondering repertoire. How much should I try to make the programs Vermonty in general? And how can each concert be specific to its particular location? (At least in some small way; I’m not planning to prepare 251 completely different programs.)
I’m still thinking about both those things, but I’ve come up with some ideas. This is one of the more abstract and geeky ones:
Like a lot of composers, I get excited about numerology. (J. S. Bach was particularly big on it.) So for the first concert, I’m playing a lot of firsts: Beethoven’s first sonata, Bach’s first published suite (it’s actually marked Opus 1, though Bach was 46 at the time; composers did not publish much in those days), and Domenico Scarlatti’s first keyboard sonata.
Scarlatti was a contemporary of Bach (born the same year) and, like Bach, a keyboard virtuoso and insanely prolific composer. He wrote 555 mostly single-movement keyboard sonatas. That’s important here, because I had come up with the notion of playing the nth piece of some kind on the nth concert of this project. And there are just not a lot of sets with 251 or more members of anything decent for keyboard.
So, unless and until I give up this obsessive part of an already obsessive project, I’m going to be learning almost half the Scarlatti sonatas across a few years. If that sounds ambitious: the great harpsichordist and general bad boy Scott Ross, in what is still considered the definitive recording, put all 555 sonatas on disc (35 CDs, to be exact) in just eighteen months in the mid-1980s. And he was already suffering the effects of AIDS, which would take him less than four years later.
A funny thing is that, unlike virtually anyone who is even sort of a concert pianist, I have never prepared or performed a Scarlatti sonata before.
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