Naxos
2007
Clementi: Early Piano Sonatas, Vol. 2
About This Album
Muzio Clementi's piano works, known to student musicians today nearly as well as they were in his own time, spanned several decades. Both Haydn and Beethoven, if not Mozart, admired him, and his influence on Beethoven is obvious. The exact nature of that influence, however, can be hard for the general listener to pin down, since the chronology of Clementi's music is unfamiliar (and opus numbers are not a reliable guide). This disc by American-British fortepianist Susan Alexander-Max helps address this difficulty; it is one of a series by the artist that focuses on Clementi's early sonatas and thus on the music by Clementi that the young Beethoven would have heard. The five three-movement sonatas here date from the early 1780s and attained wide publication in the years after they were written; they are thus works the teenage Beethoven would very likely have known well. And indeed, even if Clementi's forms are entirely more conventional than those of Beethoven or even Haydn, the pianism of a work as late as the "Moonlight" Sonata seems less radically individual after one hears this music. Clementi was a virtuoso, eclipsed by Mozart at the height of his fame, but popular across the continent, and he wrote music on which he could display the capabilities of the piano, an instrument that for his audiences was just a few years old.
Track List

Piano Sonata In B Flat Major, Op. 11/1
1.
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Piano (Harpsichord) Sonata In B Flat Major, Op. 1bis/2
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6.
Harpsichord (Piano) Sonata In G Minor, Op. 7/3
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9.
Harpsichord (Piano) Sonata In E Flat Major, Op. 9/3
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12.
Harpsichord (Piano) Sonata In A Major, Op. 10/1
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15.