Brahms: Piano Quintet In F Minor, Piano Quartet In A Major - Rudolf Serkin, Busch Quartet / Références / EMI Classics Audio CD 1993 / CDH 7 64702 2

UPC 077776470221

The Piano Quintet in F minor, Op. 34, by Johannes Brahms was completed during the summer of 1864 and published in 1865. It was dedicated to Her Royal Highness Princess Anna of Hesse. As with most piano quintets composed after Robert Schumann's Piano Quintet (1842), it is written for piano and string quartet (two violins, viola and cello).

The work, "often called the crown of his chamber music," began life as a string quintet (completed in 1862 and scored for two violins, viola, and two cellos). Brahms transcribed the quintet into a sonata for two pianos (in which form Brahms and Carl Tausig performed it) before giving it its final form. Brahms destroyed the original version for string quintet, but published the Sonata as Op. 34b. As a piano quintet, it was given its premiere on 22 June 1866, at the Leipzig Conservatory.

The outer movements are more adventurous than usual in terms of harmony and are unsettling in effect. The introduction to the finale, with its rising figure in semitones, is especially remarkable. Piano and strings play an equally important role throughout this work, which Swafford notes for its "unity of expression" and a consistently dark mood: "at times anguished, at times (in the scherzo) demonic, at times tragic."

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