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Your Favorite Piano Quintets

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#1 ·
Having mentioned Vierne's unfairly ignored piano quintet in Andruini's thread on Vierne, I thought it might be interesting to see what piano quintets people here particularly enjoy. (By piano quintet I mean pieces for piano and string quartet, not pieces for five pianos :) ). The ensemble, largely invented by Luigi Boccherini, who composed a dozen of them (way more than any other composer known to me), seems to invite composers to make especially grand gestures, allowing both the conversational feel of the string quartet and the expansive emotionality of much larger works.

My list:

1) Anton Rubinstein, Op. 99, g minor
2) Johannes Brahms, Op. 34, f minor
3) Louis Vierne, Op. 42, c minor
4) Edward Elgar, Op. 84, a minor
5) Antonin Dvorak, Op. 81, A Major (whew! At last a major key quintet)
6) Dmitri Shostakovitch, Op. 57, g minor
7) Cesar Franck, f minor

8) Franz Schubert, Op. 114, 'Trout,' A Major (with a double bass in lieu of a second violin)
 
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#2 ·
Great idea.. The Piano Quintet is a format I've always found fascinating.. Not only because of the possibilities it offers, but also for the intense musicianship it takes to assemble it correctly..
I haven't heard Vierne's but you peaked my interest!

1) Dvorak A Major, Op. 81
2) Schubert Trout Quintet, Op. 114
3) Brahms F minor, Op. 34
4) Borodin C minor
5) Martinu No. 2
6) Shostakovich G minor, Op. 57

that's all i can get off the top of my head.. I've yet to hear the Rubinstein, Elgar, Franck, Fauré(s), Sibelius, etc. etc.

kind of irrelevant, but isn't this kind of funny/cool??
 
#7 · (Edited)
Concerning piano & strings, others include:

- Gubajdulina
- Martucci
- Alfonso Rendano
- Kokkonen
- H.D.Koppel
- Bartok
- Peiko
- Schnittke
- P.A. Heise
- Sibelius
- Respighi
- Reynaldo Hahn
- Atterberg (based on his 6th Symphony)
- Boris Tchaikovsky
- Henze
- Mendelssohn (as far as I remember)
- Rochberg
- Bloch

Should I choose one, the Schnittke is of course the most different from the above-mentioned quintets - and a moving and profound one, like the somewhat Beethovenian Rochberg, very spectacular though sometimes a bit static. I don´t remember the Henze. I have a special fondness of the Franck (with Bernathova or Richter), the Faures and the Shostakovich, Schumann and Brahms quintets. Haven´t heard any of the Martinus, worth investigating, given - for example - his spectacular 2nd Cello Sonata.
As regards the lesser-known italian quintets, the Martucci is a very good work, whereas the Rendano and Respighi are less memorable.
 
#9 ·
I don't have that many piano quintets in my collection (or in memory).

I have two versions of the "Trout," one of them is an aging computer software disc that has annotations scroll by as it is playing -- very informative.

Vincent d'Indy has a dandy piano quintet in G minor I enjoy.

I also have a piano quintet by Arthur Foote, one by Mozart, and one by Franz Reizenstein. I can't honestly say I remember anything about them.

Lastly I have piano quintet by Peter Schikele that is quite playful, not surprisingly, but I found the string quartets on the same album more memorable.

To say any of these are my favorites might be a stretch. They are favorites only because they are in my collection.
 
#10 ·
I too am no expert on this genre, but here are some that I know & have enjoyed:

Granados - very light, a mix of French salon, Spanish, Moorish (& even Hungarian?) styles
Walton - an early work, the piano has a driving, Bartok like edge, while the strings remind one of the world of Debussy, Ravel & early Vaughan Williams
Schnittke- no need to introduce this masterpiece. For me, it's like a fragile ornament that has shattered into a thousand pieces.
Schubert 'Trout' - again, needs no introduction. Saw it performed live earlier this year, and it made me realise how much repetition happens in this work, almost as much as (say) in a Bruckner symphony, but obviously in a slightly different way.
Brahms (forget which one) - the Hungarian ending is the most memorable aspect to this marvellous music...
 
#42 · (Edited)
Brahms (forget which one) - the Hungarian ending is the most memorable aspect to this marvellous music...
Sid, I believe you are thinking of the first piano quartet of Brahms, not the quintet.

I am sort of fascinated by the piano quintet because of its interesting history. (Here I am cribbing from the Wikipedia article on the piano quintet, which I mainly wrote myself.)

Before Schumann, the combination of piano and string quartet was used mainly for reductions of piano concerti. Robert Schumann effectively "invented" the Romantic genre of chamber music written expressly for the combination of piano and string quartet in 1842. Taking advantage of technological advances in the manufacture of the pianoforte that expanded its power and volume, and combining it with the by-then-hallowed genre of the string quartet, Schumann created a work of extraordinary intensity that alternates between conversational passages among the five instruments and more concertante style that pits piano against the massed power of the strings.

Interestingly, the piano quintet seems to have "taken off" as chamber music moved out of the drawing room and into the concert hall.

The finest quintets for piano and string quartet are probably those by Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak. The first two are paired on a cheap Naxos recording that I think is a library cornerstone.

 
#13 ·
Bartok wrote a Piano Quintet. I just bought the CD (to arrive). Anybody here care to comment about this piece of fine music or horror?
 
#17 · (Edited)
Some other early protagonists of the Piano Quintet a la Schubert with double bass include Hummel (pre-1822), Onslow (George Onslow, I mean - (3 quintets, 1840´s ??), and Dussek (1799). At least Dussek´s and Hummel´s were a great success in their own life-time. Dussek´s could just as well be played with a cello. And there was likewise the Piano Quintet by Prince Louis Ferdinand von Preussen (1803-06). Basil Smallman in "The Piano Quartet and Quintet: Style, Structure, and Scoring"(1996) states that the Dussek was popular and influential in establishing the genre among the early Romantics, including Louis Ferdinand (p.25).

Also, the underrated Boccherini wrote 12 piano quintets (including 6 Piano Quintets op.56, 1799, and Quintets op.57). It is true that Schumann´s is the main survivor among the early piano quintets, but to say that he invented the genre is going a bit too far ...

A Naxos page (www.naxos.com/mainsite) says that
Brahms turned to a fairly new model, the piano quintet. His hero Robert Schumann, Clara's late husband, had produced his greatest masterpiece in that form, and more or less invented the piano quintet as we know it: the quintets of Boccherini were arrangements, while those by Hummel and Schubert incorporated a double bass. In its final transformation Brahms's work achieved perfection at last, so that composers such as Dvořák, Franck, Fauré, Reger, Martucci, Elgar, Bloch, Reizenstein, Toch, Martinů and Shostakovich were inspired to follow suit.
but others say that the Boccherini´s were originally for piano & strings:
(http://www.prestoclassical.co.uk/a/1375/Patrick_Cohen/1 + https://www.rillen.dk/index.asp?headGroupID=2&ProductNr=105813 + http://www.pristineclassical.com/LargeWorks/Chamber/PACM015.php).

However I agree with the Amazon-reviewer that Patrick Cohen´s fortepiano and the dry sound just doesn´t do justice to the music in the recording of the Boccherini quintets (http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews/B002NVLXEQ).

By the way Berwald also wrote two nice ones (1853).
 
#18 ·
Yep. I have the complete Boccherini piano quintets on CD. So, I'm a bit confused when I read Schumann was the first who paired the piano of his day with a string quartet.
 
#19 ·
If there was ever a piece of music I could play to anyone and say "this is the music my soul sings" it is Vaughan-Williams Piano Quintet in C Minor (1903).

Other than that and rather typically for me there's also Brahms Piano Quintet in F minor Op. 34 :)
 
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#21 ·
I almost started a new thread before finding this one. In general I have a slight preference to orchestral music, but piano quintets are special to me. Here is a list of my favorites with the first group in rough order of preference. After that I have a second group that lists ones I love in alphabetic order.

Order of Preference (roughly):

Schubert: Piano Quintet "Trout"
Schumann: Piano Quintet
Dvorak: Piano Quintet
Brahms: Piano Quintet
Shostakovich: Piano Quintet in G minor
Franck: Piano Quintet
Bartok: Piano Quintet
Mozart: Quintet for Piano and Winds
Elgar: Piano Quintet in A minor
Bruch: Piano Quintet in G minor
Vaughan Williams: Piano Quintet in C minor
Faure: Piano Quintet No. 2
Medtner: Piano Quintet
Taneyev: Piano Quintet in G minor
Hahn: Piano Quintet in F minor
Bridge: Piano Quintet in D minor
Farrenc: Piano Quintet No. 1 in A minor

Alphabetic order of others I love:

Andree: Piano Quintet in E minor
Arensky: Piano Quintet in D
Beach: Piano Quintet in F sharp
Dohnanyi: Piano Quintet No. 1 in C minor
Dohnanyi: Piano Quintet No. 2 in E flat minor
Farrenc: Piano Quintet in E
Field: Piano Quintet in A flat
Heise: Piano Quintet in F
Hummel: Piano Quintet in E flat
Liebermann: Piano Quintet
Novak: Piano Quintet in A minor
Onslow: Piano Quintet in G
Rheinberger: Piano Quintet in C

I would love those who have not seen this thread to suggest others as I'd love to sample new works.
 
#24 ·
Re Boccherini et al vs. Schumann as the inventor of the piano quintet, one wikipedia article explains it thus:

While the genres of the piano trio and piano quartet were firmly established in the eighteenth century by Mozart and others, the piano quintet did not come into its own as a genre until the nineteenth century... Although such classical composers as Dussek and Boccherini wrote quintets for piano and string quartet, more commonly, a piano would be joined by violin, viola, cello and double bass. As the double bass would generally double the bass line in the piano part, such works were in effect piano quartets with basso continuo. Schubert's "Trout" Quintet (1819) is written for this combination of forces, as are the quintets of Hummel (1802), Ferdinand Ries (1809), and Farrenc (1839, 1840).

Not until the middle of the 19th century did Robert Schumann's Piano Quintet in E-Flat Major (1842) firmly established the quintet for piano and string quartet as a significant, and quintessentially Romantic, chamber music genre.​

Sources referenced are Randel, Don Michael, The Harvard Dictionary of Music
and Smallman, Basil, The Piano Quartet and Quintet: Style, Structure, and Scoring

So -- according to this point of view, anyway -- whereas the pairing of the piano with four stringed instruments certainly originated long before Schumann, it is Schumann who deserves credit for having given each instrument its own voice.
 
#26 ·
We don` often mention (if ever) Chamber Music composed by 19th century Italian composers, so here are some fine works for Piano Quintet. There are two "big" works by Giovanni Sgambati, and a very good Quintet by Guiseppe Martucci. Martucci also wrote two Piano Trios, the first is a favorite of mine. Sgambati did compose a String Quartet that was popular in its time. I have a recording, and it has some fine moments
If we where back 40 or 50 years ago, we would be listing the Bloch Piano Quintet. I`m afraid that the Sun has set on him.
 
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