Onslow: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 3

French composer Georges Onslow really made an impressive debut as a symphonic composer with his Opus 41. Certainly, we don't need the program notes to tell us that this music was a bit old-fashioned when it was introduced, especially since Beethoven's Ninth had just made its debut in France, and most critics from thence forward through Wagner believed the symphony had reached both its apogee and logical dead-end with this masterpiece. Tell that to Hector Berlioz, whose programmatic Symphonie Fantastique made its debut as well just months before Onslow's First. Given that these two works didn't close out the history of the symphony but rather open it up for future composers as diverse as Liszt and Mahler, Onslow's effort is obviously a throwback to at least the middle symphonies of Beethoven. Yet Onslow manages to bring something original to the work. As contemporary critics pointed out about both these Onslow symphonies, they are more lyrical, more intimate than most classical symphonies, more like chamber music. Some of this has to do with Onslow's choice of instrumentation, heavy on woodwind sonorities and with a much lighter hand on the strings than Beethoven brought to his odd-numbered symphonies, with their growling basses lending a massive underpinning to the sound.