CLEMENTI: Sonatas Op. 3, 4, 14 & 36 [CD de audio] S.Lorenzi, G. Gorini and Clementi

In 1977 Leon B. Plantinga claimed that almost anyone who has studied the piano in the Western world during the past half century knows one or more of the Sonatinas. This may be marginally less true now, but Clementis career as composer, publisher and entrepreneur within the nascent field of piano manufacture ensured his almost universal popularity to a degree denied to composers of arguably greater genius but more local flavour. The easy flow of his melodies and their supremely natural fit for their instrument, as well as Clementis encyclopaedic understanding of what this fortepiano and then pianoforte could do, and how players of whatever level ability could stretch and improve themselves upon it, means that his name as one of the first significant composers for the piano, and not just for the keyboard, will live on.One of the principal domestic genres that Clementi cultivated at the apex of its marketability between the 1780s and early 1800s was the accompanied sonata, the mainstay o