Such Sweet Clawing

His back is curved as a barrel stave, and his chin kisses his chest. He looks like Satan grown chubby, but his deepest pleasure is the most innocent in Christendom--playing the harpsichord. His sweet music is brilliant and astonishingly rich, but at the end of a concert he can melt with a mundane gesture the mystic spell he has taken an evening to build. "I'm Fernando Valenti," he will say, extending a moist, pudgy hand. "Thank you very much for listening to me."

The Rat Race. Three players alone preside over the audience of baroque music aficionados left behind four years ago by Wanda Landowska, the harpsichord's high priestess. Today's masters are Ralph Kirkpatrick, Sylvia Marlowe and Valenti, and their tight little world is tense with competition: vassal harpsichordists nourish the strain by running joyously to one master with rumors of another's poor recital. Valenti has little taste for this suspicious sport; he would, if anything, prefer to withdraw.

As far as his fans in New York are concerned, Valenti might just as well have been out of town for the past ten years; even though he lives in the city, constantly makes records (53 albums since 1951), teaches at Juilliard, he gives recitals almost everywhere but home. "I'd rather avoid the rat race in New York," he says. In 1960, his records were withdrawn. Then last November, Valenti played to a packed house at Carnegie Recital Hall, and three of his albums were promptly reissued. Two weeks ago, he played there again, and now Westminster Records is ready to restore dozens more Valenti albums to the record shops.

Valenti's reluctance to play Manhattan recitals is his own mystery--he is a complex virtuoso who talks of feeling unready, being too busy, hurting his hand in Spain some years ago. But when he does play, it is invariably a triumph--both for Valenti and for the friends who have pushed him into it. Friends even help finance his career; the $6,000 instrument he plays is a gift from a twelve-man fan club called "The Friends of Valenti."

When Valenti works hard at it, the harpsichord business is terrific. He has already recorded 350 of Domenico Scarlatti's 555 sonatas, and the demand for his records has pushed him into some of the worst harpsichord music ever written: "First we did the flute and harpsichord sonatas of Bach. They went well, so we did the sonatas of Handel--which are bad Bach. They sold; so next we did the sonatas of Telemann--bad Handel. Then came the works of Frederick the Great--which are awful Telemann. We even considered the music of Frederick's sister Amelia--terrible Frederick the Great."

Nothing Sacred. At 36, Valenti, who was born in Manhattan, has refined his technique over 19 years of study until he is now the most exciting of the masters. He can color his music with crescendos and diminuendos denied to most players by the nature of the instrufnent (the strings are plucked by quills or leather picks instead of being struck by hammers), and with the clawlike attack characteristic of master players, he makes the most mechanical of instruments sound completely unmechanical.

Unlike most dwellers in the baroque, Valenti finds nothing sacred in his craft. He treats the old masters with fidelity and devotion, but he has also commissioned a harpsichord sonata from a former jazz pianist, and he plays it with relish at many of his concerts. He once played a four-week engagement in a Manhattan nightclub, and right now he is busy at home, adapting a movement from a Bach partita to a bossa nova beat.

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