Music Hunters

Perhaps because the much assaulted U.S. ear is wearying of clamorous modern dissonances, audiences seem to be falling in love all over again with the more placid sonorities of the 18th century. That interest in turn has sent students burrowing through monastery attics, museums and castles in search of long-lost scores. One of the more esoteric recent finds has come from the Escolania (music school) of Montserrat in Spain, where California-born Pianist Frederick Marvin unearthed a hoard of keyboard sonatas by Padre Antonio Soler, 18th century Spain's only great instrumental composer. Last week, in a recital at Manhattan's Town Hall, Pianist Marvin put a few samples of his find on display.

Marvin got on the trail several years ago when he stumbled across a volume of 14 Soler sonatas in a secondhand bookshop in California, immediately recognized them as "something different." He played the sonatas in recital, but suspected that they were heavily edited and set out (with the aid of a foundation grant) to track down the 50-odd additional Soler sonatas listed in musical dictionaries.

He knew that Soler had spent most of his life at the Escorial's monastery near Madrid, composing, conducting the choir and giving lessons to members of the Spanish royal family. But Escorial officials gave him no help. Marvin moved on to the Escolania at Montserrat, where

Soler had studied as a boy. There the monks installed him in an icy-cold room and supplied him with dozens of packing cases filled with yellowed manuscripts. He found no manuscripts in Soler's own handwriting (they had been destroyed in the Napoleonic invasion), but he did discover some 60 Soler sonatas lovingly copied by the monks two centuries ago in tribute to their famous pupil.

As fast as he found them, Marvin played them. "You can't imagine the thrill," he says, "of knowing I was the first man to hear them since the 18th century." Back at the Escorial, Marvin pried loose 33 additional sonatas, picked up more in Barcelona and at King's College, Cambridge. Last week's recital revealed Soler as a composer of technical virtuosity and sharply contrasted emotional effects in the Domenico Scarlatti tradition. Simple and water-clear in the slower passages, the sonatas were riffled suddenly with far-flung arpeggios and trip-hammer repetitions, combining stately classic patterns with intricately shifting, popular Spanish rhythms. Pianist Marvin played them deftly, even if he sometimes seemed rigid with dedication. He plans to record the sonatas, hopes they will help put the Padre Soler's long-neglected name beside such 18th century giants as Mozart and Haydn, where he feels it belongs.

Among other recent musicological diggings and strikes:

P: Roaming the libraries of Europe in search of old music, U.S. Conductor Newell Jenkins, 41, has unearthed and microfilmed some 600 works of 18th century Italian Composer and Organist Giovanni Battista Sammartini, who in his day was better known and more widely played than his contemporary, Johann Sebastian Bach (Haydn, however, called Sammartini a musical "dauber"). A pioneer in the development of the sonata and symphony forms, Sammartini has been credited by some experts with more than 2,000 works, including sonatas, trios, symphonies (Jenkins found more than 100) and a great variety of church music. Researcher Jenkins projected his Sammartini scores on his home screen, and after peering carefully at them through heavy spectacles, removed the archaic markings, put in bowing marks, etc. One of these, an edited Sammartini Magnificat, he performed recently with the National Orchestral Association orchestra. The classically elegant music was finely balanced and vigorous, displayed a silhouette-clear melodic line. Says Jenkins, who has not been surprised by the quick and enthusiastic reaction of audiences to Sammartini: "His works have great simplicity; there is no padding, nothing is hidden . . . The melody dictates, the harmony follows."

P: At the Austrian monastery of Goettweig, energetic U.S. Musicologist H. C. Robbins Landon, 31, stumbled across one of the two missing Masses of Franz Joseph Haydn (he wrote 14 in all). Landon was really looking for something else at Goettweig--evidence on who had written the "Jena" Symphony, once mistakenly attributed to Beethoven (Landon found evidence that it was written by early 19th century Composer Friedrich Witt). While he was combing through the files of the monastery's famed music library, Landon came across a bleached slip of paper on which a monk in 1850 had listed Haydn Masses kept in the monastery. Landon rushed to the storage files, unearthed the Mass in G Major titled Rorate Coeli Desuper (Drop dew, ye heavens, from above). The Mass, probably written between 1750 and 1760, has parts for chorus and small orchestra but none for soloists, is a Missa brevis intended to be used during Advent. "It had to be short," says Monastery Abbot Wilhelm Zedinek. "It was too cold in the churches at that time of year for anybody to last through a long Mass."

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