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Particularly over any where the coupling is not Franck's Quintet. Order from your preferred classical music CD store - ArkivMusic. Cesar Franck: Quintet For Piano And Strings In F M. What is most striking perhaps to someone who only knows Franck's music from the Piano Quintet of 1879 onwards is the relentlessly diatonic harmony of the early works. IT IS a strange paradox that while organists comment how Franck wrote for the organ like a pianist, pianists point out how 'organ like' his piano music is.
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Yet this performance, involving the closest thing to ‘elder abuse’ I have seen on the concert stage, received an immediate standing ovation and an encore.įor an introduction to the Franck Piano Quintet, one could hardly do better than sampling the excellent Naxos recording (8.553645) with the Ludwig Quartet and pianist Michael Levinas.Franck: Piano Music. The pianist had to force things, making mistakes, at one point coming in bars too early. Here the Emerson’s played so loud and aggressively throughout that this poor pianist, now almost 90 years, could hardly get a note through. Compare this with last year’s Brahms Piano Quintet with the Emerson Quartet and ‘the father of modern chamber music’, pianist Menahem Pressler. While one might think of the Quintet as tragic, indeed the most glaring tragedy was that the performance received a muted reception.
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This is a much greater work than I had thought. It all flowed as a beautifully-enchanting story.įor all the top-drawer performances that the Friends of Chamber Music has brought to us, I found this one pretty overwhelming and unique. The care with which the quartet exposited the final movement was something to marvel at: each player so aware of what the others were doing, the pianist always watching her father, and the incredible beauty of the latter’s playing at the end. Each movement seemed to build naturally to its climax, evoking the deepest feelings. So exactly balanced was the group’s sound that one could hear every instrument at all times, including the softest piano notes. There was power, and indeed volume levels seldom heard at the Playhouse, yet there was always soft tenderness alongside.
Franck piano quintet program notes full#
The ebb and flow of the writing was judged perfectly, from the quiet rhapsodic piano statements at the opening to the volcanic punctuations from the full group that come later on. While the old-world Russian style of this ensemble may be too heavy and rugged for some pieces, here it fit perfectly - bringing an intensity, concentration and glow to the whole work. Not on this occasion! The Kopelman Quartet, with pianist Elizaveta Kopelman (the leader’s daughter), played it all out with phenomenal grip and weight. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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Written in 1880, its dedicatee, famed composer Camille Saint-Seans, disowned the work on its premiere performance, leaving behind the original manuscript. Franck’s Piano Quintet did not have a good start. While there have been recordings over the years, perhaps this neglect is explainable. Belgian composer, Cesar Franck, is a remarkable work yet, in years of concert-going, I have never heard a live performance of it. The Piano Quintets of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and Dvorak form the core, with occasional ventures to those of Gabriel Faure and Shostakovich. Yet most concerts feature only a handful of such works. Central to the repertoire of any string quartet are works in which it can play alongside a piano.