Palazzetto Bru Zane - Centre de Musique Romantique Française

The piano lost no time in ousting the violin to become the favourite instrument of the Romantics. With more and more musicians playing it, a radical change came about in the traditional balances in musical compositions. By turns a soloist, an accompanist or a member of the ensemble (like an orchestral musician), the keyboard opened up new possibilities for the string quartet and quintet.

The piano concerto too came to be regarded as more exciting than its violin or cello equivalent, because of the strong contrast permitted between the (autonomous) soloist and the orchestra. Despite an undeniable predilection for the strings (completely in line with his predecessor George Onslow), Gouvy employed the piano expertly in different combinations (with the violin in sonatas, in trio, in quintet). For the solo instrument he composed, in the years 1840-1850, several “serenades” (elegant, romantic, Mendelssohn-like “songs without words”), two sonatas and a number of studies.

But it was above all his corpus of pieces for four hands and his works for two pianos (including the ambitious Fantaisie of 1879 and the splendid Sonata in D minor of 1875) that truly enriched the traditional repertoire of that time with works in which absolute music predominates – a principle that was strongly challenged at that time by the upholders of programme music and the symphonic poem.