Just came across Scarlatti's
Sonata K. 32 - and it may be one of the most desolate pieces of music I've ever heard. [if the word 'sonata' intimidates you, don't worry: Scarlatti sonatas are single-movement pieces, uner 10 minutes - this one's less than 4 minutes].
I've only really looked into Scarlatti in the last six months or so; he's a fascinating composer. In some ways he's like a bridge between Bach (Baroque melodies (all meandering and rhythmically odd) and dense harmonic progressions) and Mozart (elegant simplicity). But there's also something really modern about him - some of his pieces could be 20th or 21st century works. In particular, his use of sparse textures (although he was a famous harpsichord virtuoso, a lot of his music is straightforward for beginners to play, at least in a technical sense), his strange harmonies, and his pathos, he reminds me a lot of later Liszt. He's always slightly unexpected (a lot of his sonatas seem to start with some inelegant theme, and then make it trascendent in the second half).
In fact, this confusing anachronicity had me personally puzzled until a couple of months ago: for many, many, many years I've been familiar with a short piece of music that I learnt to play at one point, but I could never work out what it was (I have the sheet music, but it's a photocopy from a book, and didn't mention the composer on that page, or even a full title). Its driving harmonic rhythm made me initially assume Bach, but I couldn't find it in Bach's works; in any case, it had a certain direct simplicity, a sentimentality and warmth, that I didn't associate with Bach; I wondered whether it was a much later (late 19th century) work in an intentionally old-fashioned style. Turns out: it was Scarlatti all along. [it's
this one, if you're wondering - if you're wondering why I might have thought it was modern, wait for those growling dischords at the end of the first part...]
[for something really 20th century:
what the HELL is going on with the theme of this fugue!? It's more Shostakovich than Bach! In fact, it's so utterly bizarre that for centuries people assumed it must actually have been written by Scarlatti's cat, wandering randomly across the keyboard, and so it's traditionally called the Cat Fugue (although there's no contemporary mention of this idea).]
But I'll leave you with something a bit more pleasant and accessible:
K. 531. Sometimes it's Mozart, sometimes it's Bach, sometimes it's a century later than either of them... (particularly once the harmonies of the second half arrive).
[Unfortunately, there's one giant problem with Scarlatti's sonatas: there's 555 of them. They're all short, most of them have the same structure, and none of them have any names. Most were published posthumously, and while some were published in sets, they aren't definitive - the same sonatas could be published in different groups or orders in different publications. They're known by the catalogue numbers given by later indexers, but there's half a dozen catalogues and the numbers are completely different - the G minor one I posted above is K.8, but it's also L.488 and P.64... which is a bit confusing. Wikipedia prefers the Kirkpatrick numbers, but IMSLP knows them by their Longo numbers. For a newcomer, this kind of turns Scarlatti into an amorphous, intimidating mass of music - the combination of a vast number of pieces, the fact that they're all short and hence less easy to remember which is which, and the lack of any names all makes it frustratingly hard even to find a piece you've heard before....]