Hyperion Records

The sonatas ‘Opus 40, Book I’, published in 1802, were never followed by a ‘Book II’. In fact no new sonatas of Clementi were to appear before 1820, the year of his single Sonata Op 46. The following year saw his final publication of sonatas, the three of Op 50, dedicated to his fellow Italian who had made a splendid career in Paris, Luigi Cherubini. There is good reason to believe, however, that Clementi had composed much of this music years earlier, and had intended it as the second instalment of Op 40. Perhaps some unfavourable reviews of his music around 1800 contributed to a certain caution about publishing his work; a notice in a Leipzig journal from 1807 refers to several major new compositions of his which Clementi ‘is determined not to release to the public until he has satisfied himself that they are perfect’.

The first sonata of Op 50, in A major, has an opening movement with something of the transparent texture and lyrical melody that Clementi seemed to associate with this key, as in his Sonata Op 33 No 1, and even as far back as Op 2 No 4. For a slow movement Clementi writes a rather leisurely two-voice canon flanked by two statements of a lugubrious, harmonically potent Adagio sostenuto e patetico that anticipates the subject of the canon in its middle section. The finale, a spritely Allegro vivace, mixes traditional harmonies with the distinctly nineteenth-century sound of the expanded upper range of the piano.

from notes by Leon Plantinga © 2010