It seems sad to me that the majority of performers are so myopic that they refuse to admit the possibility that there might be a good deal of marvellous music just sitting there in libraries and begging to be played. The piano duet team of Yaara Tal and Andreas Groethuysen have resurrected an entirely forgotten French/German composer of the nineteenth century, who turns out to have been a master in writing for this idiom. The best of these pieces are without doubt equal in calibre to much of the accepted repertoire.
Louis Theodore Gouvy (1819–98) started off his career with the idea of becoming a virtuoso pianist, but abandoned this and turned to composition. Apparently, he liked to write symphonies. He knew Liszt and from the 1860s lived mainly in Germany. As the booklet points out, Gouvy was no romantic and the works here, classical in conception, belong more to the world of Schubert. A heavily touched-up photograph of the composer gives the impression of austerity, something that is not borne out in the music. True, his grasp of structure is very assured, but Gouvy comes across more as a very gentle person with a colourful imagination, at times reminiscent of Dvorak. Many of his ideas are off-beat, his modulations individual and sophisticated.
The three sonatas, curiously enough, have motivic links. Gouvy never wastes notes and is a master of four-hand texture. Perhaps the C minor Sonata is not as memorable as the subtly lyrical D minor but then the composer obviously is not intending to make his mark with ideas of shattering import. The second movement of the F major marked Andantino scherzoso, is perky and innocent-sounding and the very light character of the finale, which does admittedly lapse into silliness at the end, rounds off a piece that takes its ideas very much from orchestral scoring. Tal and Groethuysen play the music with such a fantastic degree of ensemble that one is oblivious of there being two performers involved. Recorded sound is exemplary.'