Very little is known of Loewe outside the songs and ballads: one of the oratorios by which he set such store is currently in the catalogue, Das Suhenopfer des Neuen Bundes, but not Jan Huss, on which Schumann wrote a long and laudatory article; none of the operas; one symphony, one piano concerto; none of the piano music until now. Loewe hoped to follow Beethoven, rather in the way that Berlioz and Liszt did with the symphony, by extending the range of the piano sonata to embrace vocal and dramatic or narrative forms.
So the E major Sonata here recorded has for its slow movement a song, a setting of a French romance Toujours je te serais fidele. It is a wildly impractical idea, but it works rather touchingly here, in the context of music that owes a great deal to early Beethoven. Loewe wrote other narrative sonatas, one of them describing an emigrant setting off for America and settling in the Wild West, another embracing a Biblical triptych, and the present Le printemps, which he described as a “tone-poem in the form of a sonata”. It begins with twittering birds at daybreak, continues with a slower movement in full day, turns fugal for merry peasant life, and ends at dusk. It is a pleasant enough piece, though it could do with sharper and more concentrated characterization than it gets from Cord Garben, who might also have made more of the most substantial of these works, the F minor Sonata, or Grande Sonate elegique. The music here proceeds tunefully and effectively, but it is difficult not to feel that Loewe was really in his element with the songs and ballads, where a narrative and some graphic detail could give his imagination focus and direction. Nevertheless, these are real rarities, and Loewe’s admirers may well think them worth investigation.'