DUETS, PIANO-FORTE.

  1. The OVERTURE to La Bayadère, composed by AUBER. (Chappell.)
  2. Recollections of Nieborg, composed by FRED. KUHLAU. (Wessel and Co.)
  3. Recollections of Bogensee, composed and published as the preceding.
  4. Souvenir à Schönbrunn, SECOND GRANDE MARCHE, composée par CHARLES CZERNY. Op. 250. (Wessel and Co.)

No. 1 is certainly not likely to gain admission into the Philharmonic Concerts; it will never be put forward as the companion or rival to the Zauberflöte, Prometheus, or Freischütz overture, but is well suited to the Ballet Opera of which it is the gentleman-usher. Opening with a pastoral gaiety, then changing into a movement of bolder liveliness, but free from all those combinations, that modulation, so necessary to the connoisseur of northern climes, it is in good keeping with the music that follows, and with the temperament of those oddly-mixed tropical personages who appear in that strange, nondescript theatrical representation, called La Bayadère.

Nos. 2 and 3 have Danish melodies, or airs so called, for their foundation, worked up with considerable ingenuity by the late M. Kuhlau. No. 2, consisting of three short movements, is graceful, airy, and easy. No. 3 is also divided into three parts, but they are longer than those in the preceding, have cost the composer rather more thought, and require a quicker finger in the performer. Though there is nothing strikingly original in either of these duets, they have nothing vulgar, and little that is common, in them; and there is enough fancy and good taste in their composition to enable us to mention both in favourable terms.

No. 4 was, it appears, composed for her Majesty Maria Anna Carolina, queen of what state we are not told; and it certainly was not likely to puzzle her royal brains, for not a bar is there in it that had not, in some shape or other, been played by her Majesty during the progress of her musical studies. To compose anything new in the form of a march is undoubtedly a difficult task, and M. Czerny seems to have been determined that his two hundred and fiftieth opera should not be a work of labour.