This piano duet recital is a little out of the ordinary. Fauré’s Dolly Suite is standard territory but it is usually paired with familiar duets by Bizet, Debussy or Ravel, not Liszt’s Hungarian rhapsody and certainly not a piano-duet Sonata by Georges Onslow, a composer whose light has only relatively recently begun to glow after over a century of neglect. A little of that glow was contributed by the present duo team with their first volume of France Revisited (review). It included the first of his two sonatas for piano duet and six unpublished piano solos. A brief biography can be found in that review. Onslow’s published output concentrates on chamber music, with over eighty string quartets, quintets and assorted trios, sextets and septets. There are also operas, four symphonies and a scattering of piano works. Some composers may have been jealous of his wealth but he evidently had talent. Publishers such as Breitkopf und Härtel, C.F. Peters, Pleyel and Shimrock, amongst others, would not have spared printing time on him if that was not the case.
Onslow wrote this second sonata when he was developing a reputation as a composer of instrumental music, though admittedly this was mostly outside France. In France, they were more interested in opera; Onslow’s L’Alcalde de la vega and Le colporteur were performed in Paris in the 1820s. In an attempt to promote his instrumental work, publisher Camille Pleyel described Onslow as Our French Beethoven, perhaps a teeny-weeny bit of hyperbole. The drama of the sonata’s opening movement certainly suggests the comparison, though the style is more akin to the writing of Hummel or Kalkbrenner. As with the first sonata, Schubert is hinted at in the lyrical second theme. This is reinforced by the sway of the second movement minuet with its quasi-duet between lower and upper pianist and the distinctive predominating motif. The largo introduction to the finale serves as a slow movement. Its rising octave immediately put me in mind of the slow movement of D.960, though the mood is different. The finale proper is lighthearted, a little like Mendelssohn, but the opening of the movement reminded me strongly of Saint-Saëns’s concertante Africa fantasy, enough so that I feel he knew this work. It certainly had its admirers, and no less musical giants than Chopin and Liszt performed it together in 1834.
Fauré wrote Dolly Suite, a staple of the duet repertoire, for Régina-Hélène, aka Dolly, daughter of the singer Emma Bardac. The lilting berceuse was gifted for Dolly’s first birthday; the stumbling scherzo Mi-a-ou recalls the two year old’s attempt at her brother’s name. Dolly’s garden is evoked in a flowing song without words. The fourth piece, a delightfully sparkling waltz, concerns Bardac’s dog Ketty; the published title is Kitty Valse though Fauré write Ketty on the manuscript. The penultimate Tendresse is closer in mood and harmony to Fauré’s early nocturnes than the berceuse or Dolly’s garden. The finale, the high spirited Spanish Dance, could have come from the pen of Fauré’s friend Emmanuel Chabrier.
Liszt is a cosmopolitan figure but is really the only connection to France when it comes to the inclusion here of his famous rhapsody. The music is Hungarian, arranged here by Liszt’s Weimar pupil Franz Bendel born in Schönlinde, now Krásná Lípa, in what was Bohemia. Neither Liszt nor his Rhapsody require description but, as the booklet is silent about Bendel, perhaps he deserves a few words. He studied with Josef Proksch, a blind musician who went on to teach Bedřich Smetana. He toured widely and taught at, amongst other institutions, Karl Tausig’s Schule des Höheren Klavierspiels. He was also a prolific composer. Although his masses, symphonies and chamber works have faded from view, some of his many, many salon piano solos used to crop up in old star folio type collections. I first heard an Anton Rubinstein song by playing Bendel’s rather straightforward transcription in my teens. In his adaptation of the rhapsody, he changes the key to C minor and simplifies some figuration, possibly in a nod to the intended amateur market. Yet his is Liszt after all, and Bendel can only do so much and still retain authenticity so Liszt’s mini cadenzas in the lassan, the slow opening section, are all there. Pianists Robert and Linda Ang Stoodley restore some of the figuration and add cadenzas of their own creation. One is a link to the friska, the fast section; the other greatly extends Bendel’s existing cadenza at the point where Liszt invites performers to strut their stuff. In this, they continue a tradition that can be heard in recordings ranging from Rachmaninov and Rosenthal to Hamelin and Maltempo.
The performances here, all first-rate, match the moods and idioms of this varied programme.