Given all this, it is not surprising that Soler’s output is a little uneven. I haven’t heard all ten previous volumes of Gilbert Rowland’s Naxos series, but on some of the ones I have heard this was very marked . In volume 11 the general level is pretty high, most of the sonatas, in their different ways, showing Soler at something like his best.

In many of the sonatas – like much in the music of Scarlatti (with whom Soler studied) and Boccherini – one can hear the influence of the syncopated dance rhythms of Spain. This is true, for example, of the second subject in the C major sonata which opens the present programme (and which has no Rubio number, not being included in Father Samuel Rubio’s great edition) and of sonatas 45 and 51. There are places, too, where some of Soler’s melodic materials sound as though they may be derived from Spanish folk music, as in the first two movements of Sonata 65.

Yet, for all his ‘Spanishness’, Soler can sometimes surprise one by writing in idioms which one wouldn’t readily think of as Spanish. So, for example, the Rondo, marked ‘andantino con moto’, which opens the four-movement Sonata 62 sounds more like a piece of Viennese classicism, like Haydn or Mozart, for example, than anything else – if one heard it played on the fortepiano the resemblance would, I suspect, seem even greater. This is really only to say that Soler is a good deal more various than he has sometimes been thought to be, that he is far more than merely an imitator of Scarlatti. His sonatas in several movements – this CD includes no. 65 in three movements, as well as Sonata 62 – attempt things quite different from the work of his early master, for all the many echoes of Scarlatti.

Gilbert Rowlands has a sure-fingered understanding of Soler’s idioms and a clear-sighted sense of the differences between the sonatas (evident in his useful booklet notes as well as in his performances). I enjoy his playing, except perhaps in some of the louder climaxes, though this may be the fault of a not especially attractive sounding instrument – described as a "Concert Flemish harpsichord from the Paris Workshop, prepared and tuned by Andrew Wooderson". But this is a relatively small blemish on a generally interesting and enjoyable recital.

-- Glyn Pursglove, MusicWeb International