A prolific composer of exceptional talent, Domenico Cimarosa (Aversa, 1749 – Venice, 1801) was one of the leading composers of 18th-century Italian opera, greatly admired throughout Europe. Today he is known mainly for Matrimonio Segreto (Vienna, 1792), but his output of operas numbers almost one hundred works, which were performed to resounding success anywhere there was a theatre and a company of singers.

In his long and successful creative life, Cimarosa also wrote a series of sonatas for keyboard, generally very short but full of interest and worthy heirs to Domenico Scarlatti’s 555 harpsichord sonatas. A first collection of the Cimarosa Sonatas was published by Felice Boghen in Paris in 1925. Boghen’s collection consisted of 32 sonatas, and almost all performers used that publication. In 1971, two Italian pianists, Vincenzo Vitale and Carlo Bruno, made a new edition based on the Cimarosa manuscripts of the Conservatory of Florence, adding 31 new sonatas. Andrea Coen recently published the complete 88 Sonatas in two books. After a first CD featuring 44 of the works (CDS 7720), pianist Dario Candela now concludes the project with this second double-CD. He tackles these works with the nuanced virtuosity and lyricism that only an heir to the great Neapolitan piano school can deliver, such as he is.