What does this project means within the context of your personal experience as a pianist and musician?

This is a very significant leg of the journey, and a long awaited one. I have always cultivated classical piano along with jazz; which I have characterised my musical life since the beginning, which I have always kept separate in public but that now, thanks to Scarlatti, I’ve been able to bring together into one single discourse.

Why Scarlatti?

Scarlatti is a musician that I have always deeply loved; books of his sonatas have always lain by my piano. I could list so many reasons for this “love affair” – his formal imagination, rhythmic vitality, passion, Mediterranean flavour – his sounds contain the colours of the Italian sky and sea, our desire for life and love and our yearning...

What does Scarlatti’s music have in common with jazz?

It’s moody, prismatic, full of movement, tracing a kind of life flow, like jazz improvisation, and it is a well-know fact that Scarlatti was an extraordinary improviser. And his language too, although written down on paper, shares with jazz a kind of imposing, pagan physicality. This clearly comes out in his many ingenious thematic motifs, which are rhythmic patterns, melodic nuclei, and at times simple intervals not theoretically worked out but that his hands created directly on the keyboard and then later fleshed out and embellished.

There have been many attempts in the recent past to “jazzify” classical music. Is this project of yours one of those?

Absolutely not! I have not “jazzified” Scarlatti, and I think that all attempts at what they call “jazzification” have been failures both in terms of jazz as well as the classical material they appropriate. Doing so would have been an insulting mockery and a distortion of the profound meaning contained in the composition of that great Neapolitan master.

How then would you describe your approach to the master’s sonatas?

I like to call it “action composing”. I use improvisation to elaborate, in real time, elements treated in the sonatas in an attempt to create complete narrative forms. I apply all the devices normally employed in compositional technique: augmentation and diminutions, inversions, sudden key, rhythm and colour changes – in short, the vocabulary of 20^th century music. So jazz really has very little to do with it, except for the use of improvisation, which is not at all its exclusive property.

Why is it that some of the sonatas have no improvisation either preceding or following them?

Sonatas K.18, K.51 or K.260 are musical pieces of such intensity and structural solidity that I didn’t feel there was anything to add. And then, their original naked, powerful compactness presented alongside the sonatas preceded or followed by my improvisations makes for a generally intriguing contrast.

In your opinion, where does Domenico Scarlatti’s true genius lie?

He was a visionary, many decades ahead of the musical solutions that we later find in Schubert and Beethoven. To use a term currently in fashion, he could be considered a precursor of cross-over music - just take the abundance of Neapolitan and Spanish folk music we find in his sonatas.

But, more that anything else, Scarlatti was an exceptional inventor of “short stories”, a narrator, comparable on the level of formal style, human sensitivity and depth to the tales of Flaubert, Cechov and Verga. After playing one of his sonatas it is hard to say whether you’ve played a game or had a dream, or dreamt about a game, but one thing is sure: what you are left with is an overwhelming desire to begin once again either to play the game or to dream.

Interview to Enrico Pieranunzi by Andrea Scaccia (translated by Darragh Henegan)