If you happened to pick up this music on, say, the car radio, it would, I think, be quite a challenge to identify it. You could date it readily enough as belonging to the 1820s or 1830s, but I doubt whether you could put a nationality to it, still less a composer. Georges Onslow (1784-1853) was Anglo-French (English ancestry, French birth and principal domicile). Beethoven and Schubert are very distant as reference points, Mendelssohn and Spohr perhaps rather closer. The music, however, is richly worked, vivid and passionate. Its textures are very full and very busy, much more egalitarian than most in the chamber repertory – undoubtedly great fun to play – with much interchange between the voices, and involving elaborate accompaniment figures.
It would be easy to say that sometimes there is a lot going on and plenty of excitement, but not much actually happening; however that would be slightly unfair. The C minor work in particular, which has a programme derived from a shooting accident during a hunt when Onslow nearly lost his life, is quite remarkable: a first movement of great intensity, with some passionate music in the development section, a minuet (Dolore, febbre e delirio) with ferocious accents, vast chromatic slithers and diminished sevenths galore, portraying his desperation, then an Andante representing convalescence (not quite on the ethereal spiritual level of Beethoven’s Op. 132, but hymn-like and dark-textured), and then a brilliant C major finale.
The other two works are not programmatic but also have plenty of strongly imagined music. Op. 39 in E boasts a very appealing Adagio, its main theme presented in a variety of ways and contexts, a minuet with a fragmented melody of considerable charm, and an exuberant and powerfully developed finale. The first movement of the B minor work, Op. 40 again shows Onslow’s grasp of structural tension in the powerful shaping of sections and the absorption of lyrical and dramatic elements; there is another near-violent minuet (a development quite distinct from the Beethovenian scherzo style) and again a slow movement of much passion. In the past I have always thought of Onslow as a rather conventional figure, but that is mistaken. He may not be a great composer, but he is certainly an extremely interesting one, with ideas of some originality and a considerable technique. These musicians, using the famous Stradivari instruments in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC, play with great spirit, warmth and skill and convey the full measure of the passion behind the music. I hope many readers will try this fascinating disc.'