Midnights in Manhattan

One day last spring a young (28) Manhattan musician named Fernando Valenti found himself stuck in a customs office in Peru. That big instrument he had with him, said the officials, was undeniably a piano, and therefore subject to import duty. It was not a piano, insisted Valenti; it was a harpsichord. Then and there, the oldtime mechanism of strings and quills was uncrated, and Valenti sat down to play while some 150 people listened. After an hour of music, officialdom was satisfied, and Valenti proceeded on his concert tour. "I have never refused to do anything unusual," he says, "so long as it is within the bounds of respectability."

Last week he was nestled in the respectable but unusual surroundings of Manhattan's Little Club, a dim East Side spot with some Broadway overtones, for a series of Sunday-midnight concerts. Looking a little like a pudgy, scholarly Satan, Harpsichordist Valenti threaded his way among the tables, mounted the platform and affectionately patted the maple-colored instrument. Then he launched into pieces by such 18th century composers as Rameau, Domenico, Scarlatti and Bach. The music was brief, gracefully decorated with trills and curlicues, and its precise pinpoints of sound and muffled thunder filled the small room better than they do a larger concert hall. Customers found the music relaxing and, after the strangeness of the first few notes had worn off, a good blend with bourbon or Scotch.

As a direct musical descendant of modern harpsichord greats (he is a pupil of Ralph Kirkpatrick, who is a pupil of Wanda Landowska), Fernando Valenti thinks harpsichordists must play for wider and wider audiences if interest in the instrument is not to die out. He is building a reputation as one of the most imaginative harpsichordists in the U.S., giving some 20 solo recitals a year and lecturing about the music he plays. Valenti has begun a musical marathon: recording all 555 of Scarlatti's gemlike Sonatas (for Westminster). In the past three years he has completed 72, but half seriously wonders whether he will ever be able to finish the lot.

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