Enrico Pieranunzi / Domenico Scarlatti

To mark the 250th anniversary of the death of Domenico Scarlatti (1685–1757), Enrico Pieranunzi will dedicate a special concert to the Neapolitan composer, exclusively for the French Academy in Rome—Villa Medici. Pieranunzi will perform numerous sonatas with absolute fidelity, then take the thematic motifs and revisit them as a starting point for his improvisational “digressions”—as only someone who has mastered a classical repertoire to perfection, and not just jazz, can do. A collaboration, then, that is extravagant only in appearance.

On one hand, Domenico Scarlatti, who was the greatest harpsichord improviser of his time; on the other, Enrico Pieranunzi, an internationally renowned musician and composer who, just last year, improvised on Mozart’s works during the ImproMozart concert.

The Pieranunzi/Scarlatti collaboration made its European debut last summer at the Beethoven House in Bonn, Germany. The concert at the Villa Medici marks the Italian premiere of this project and serves as a prelude to the recording of a CD for CamJazz. “Domenico Scarlatti is, therefore, the composer of more than five hundred harpsichord sonatas, and it is thus that he appears, sovereign, in this azure land of solitary peaks where, after the frivolities of the world, the angels and heroes of music come to life again.” So spoke a famous music historian of Scarlatti and his body of sonata works. How can Scarlatti’s music be connected to a project conceived by a jazz pianist? At the origin of this project lies a surprising yet intriguing intuition: that Domenico Scarlatti was, in a sense, a true jazz musician ahead of his time.

It is well known that Scarlatti was the most extraordinary harpsichord improviser of his time. But beyond that, it is the very nature of his sonatas that allows us to see the Neapolitan composer as a sort of precursor to that remarkable art of improvisation—an improvisational component of composition—which constitutes the deepest and most fascinating essence of jazz. His sonatas are, in fact, based on a miraculous balance between the spirit of improvisation and compositional skill. I have always been struck by the unparalleled imagination, vitality, and Mediterranean warmth of his sonatas. (Enrico Pieranunzi) In 1989 and 2003, he was honored in the “Top Jazz” poll, conducted annually by the magazine *Musica Jazz*. He also won the “Django d’Or” in 1997 as best European musician, an honor that was reaffirmed in 2005 by the Guinness Festival in Cork, Ireland. He has performed at the most important European festivals and on numerous occasions in the United States.

In 2004, he toured Japan as part of a trio with Marc Johnson and Joey Baron, which resulted in the CD *Live in Japan* (CamJazz). The renowned North American writer and journalist Nat Hentoff wrote the following about him: “Pieranunzi is a pianist of intense lyricism, capable of expressing a succession of ideas and drawing lines defined by great clarity and inner logic; he is able to swing with energy and freshness without ever losing his poetic sensibility. His music sings.” Ray Spencer, in the *Jazz Journal*, wrote of his playing that “Enrico Pieranunzi breathes new life into contemporary jazz,” and Josef Woodard, in an article dedicated to him published in *Jazz Times* in February 2000, summed up his qualities in these words: “Remember the name, get lost in the music.”