Franck Piano Quintet Program Notes For Band

Central to the repertoire of any string quartet are works in which it can play alongside a piano. Yet most concerts feature only a handful of such works.

The Piano Quintets of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and Dvorak form the core, with occasional ventures to those of Gabriel Faure and Shostakovich. Download Advertising Books. The Piano Quintet of the 19th C. Belgian composer, Cesar Franck, is a remarkable work yet, in years of concert-going, I have never heard a live performance of it. While there have been recordings over the years, perhaps this neglect is explainable. Franck’s Piano Quintet did not have a good start.

Written in 1880, its dedicatee, famed composer Camille Saint-Seans, disowned the work on its premiere performance, leaving behind the original manuscript. Indeed, one can point to a lack of sophistication both string and the piano parts; the themes are often pretty simple and some of the piano writing could almost be described as crude. Yet why would Tournemire refer to this work as the ‘king of piano quintets’ and why would Parisian audiences demand that it be played again and again? Largely because it conjures up an uncomfortable world of passion and melancholy that goes much beyond the emotional range of many of the prettier pieces written at that time. How To Install Sepm With Sql Example. In Franck’s Piano Quintet we find ourselves more in the brooding, unsettled post-Romantic world of Schoenberg in his Verklerte Nacht or possibly Scriabin. It is the darkness of expression that attracts some and pushes others away; the work’s chromatic melodies are not really that different in form than those in the composer’s ever-popular Symphony in D or the Violin Sonata in A.

Traditional performances of the Quintet have sometimes tried to remove its apparent excesses by playing up its refined beauty at the expense of its raw passion. Not on this occasion! The Kopelman Quartet, with pianist Elizaveta Kopelman (the leader’s daughter), played it all out with phenomenal grip and weight.