Carl Czerny is best known as Beethoven’s pupil, Liszt’s teacher, and a prolific spinner-outer of piano etudes and method books. He also “czerned” out original compositions by the pound, including a large stock of piano duets. Czerny may not have personalized the classical style to his one-time teacher’s extraordinary degree, yet the three (previously unrecorded) sonatas encompassing this disc are skillfully wrought and thoroughly idiomatic in regard to the duet medium.
The same can be said for Diane Andersen and Daniel Blumenthal. They sensitively balance each other and delineate imitative and fugal writing well (the Op. 119’s Allegretto à la Hongroise, for instance). The duo brings both orchestral resplendence and lilting gait to the Pastorale Sonata’s finale, which resembles a glitzy rewrite of Beethoven’s better-known symphonic finale with the same nickname. At times, however, I could imagine the primo’s flashy passagework and tremolos projected with more lyrical shaping and tonal differentiation (as in the Op. 120 finale and Op. 121 first movement). That aside, duet fans in search of novelties surely will enjoy this disc–even more due to Diane Andersen’s fine, informative booklet notes.
