Emmanuel Jacques / Maude Gratton GEORGE ONSLOW Sonates pour violoncelle et piano, Op. 16

From his name alone, you might well think that Onslow was an English composer. In fact, André George Louis Onslow – to give him his full name – was a French composer but of English descent. Some sources add a final ‘s’ to George in the Gallic manner. Unlike some of his other French contemporaries, he was fortunate, and financially able enough to pursue a path more akin to Romantic colleagues in Germany, where his music had a strong following as, indeed, it also had in England. He wrote four symphonies and operas, but his principal output was in chamber music. Despite being held in high esteem by many of the critics of the day, his reputation declined swiftly after his death, though it is now being revived largely through the CD medium.

Born in Clermont-Ferrand, the son of an English father, and grandson of the first Earl of Onslow, and a French mother, Marie Rosalie de Bourdeilles de Brantôme, Onslow published his set of three sonatas for cello and piano in 1820. At the time, he was still largely unknown in his homeland, while his first chamber works had already won hearts in Germany. He thus came of age in the shadow of Beethoven, and was often later referred to as the ‘French Beethoven’. The German master had already written his first two cello sonatas in 1796, no. 3 followed in 1808, while the last two were composed simultaneously in 1815, and published two years later. Onslow broke away from the prevailing French tradition, taking his lead from Beethoven, in writing sonatas where both cello and piano were equal protagonists in the musical argument, rather than giving the former a somewhat subsidiary, accompanying role. While Onslow has often been likened to Beethoven, as well as the occasional fleeting references to the likes of Mozart, Haydn, Spohr and Mendelssohn, in some of his music, and certainly on the present CD, it’s not difficult to detect Schubert particularly with his harmonic progressions. There's even a pianistic sophistication in the writing that casts more than a nod in the direction of Chopin. (Philip R Buttall)