Hyperion Records

In 1811, four years after the C minor piano sonata, Onslow composed an entertaining ‘Caprice ou Toccata’ (as it was styled in the first edition), a test of leggiero playing at speed that refracts the spirit of a Baroque toccata (complete with hints of fugal texture) through an early Romantic prism. Could Schumann have remembered Onslow’s work when he came to write his own strikingly similar Toccata in the same key, Op 7, nearly two decades later?

from notes by Richard Wigmore © 2012