If you love the piano duet literature and don’t know George Onslow’s two serious, substantial minor-key sonatas, a major discovery awaits you. They’re packed with wonderful tunes, imaginative harmonic ideas, and a style of piano writing that anticipates Chopin’s innovations. In Onslow’s F minor sonata, to cite one instance, some of the first movement’s sequential patterns foreshadow those in Chopin’s F minor concerto. A coincidence? Sadly, we’re stuck with drab, colorless, and rough-hewn performances that lack the technical and stylish finesse to do this music justice. Scales, trills, and runs are more unevenly executed than not, and melodic lines are choppily demarcated by bumpy accents and vague, inelegant phrasing.
Likewise, Franz Hünten’s deliciously showy variations on a theme from Rossini’s The Barber of Seville are served up in humorless monochrome slabs of notes that fail to illuminate the music’s joyful panache. Loud tutti chords are voiced with a slapdash quality similar to what you hear from enthusiastic sightreaders plowing through four-hand orchestral reductions. Normally I can refer you to alternate, reference recordings, but not this time. I need your assistance. Surely first-rate recordings of these wonderful works exist out there in CD land. Help me, readers. . .
