Classic Cat

print  
Works/Mp3
Description
Genres

Piano quintet: Description

Buy cd's at Amazon
Buy sheetmusic at SheetMusicPlus
Subscribe for music downloads to EMusic or Napster

A piano quintet is a chamber musical ensemble made up of one piano and four other instruments, or the name of a piece written for such a group.

The most common grouping is one piano, two violins, a viola, and a cello—that is, a piano with a string quartet. This combination of instruments is sufficiently prevalent in classical music that when the phrase piano quintet is used without qualification, it usually refers to this particular group.

Several composers have written piano quintets, although few have written more than one, a rare exception being Gabriel Fauré, who wrote two. Other composers to have written for the usual grouping of a string quartet plus piano include Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, Antonín Dvořák (who also wrote more than one, though only the second is played with any regularity), and Dmitri Shostakovich. Franz Schubert's famous Trout Quintet is written for the less usual combination of piano, violin, viola, cello, and double bass.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven both wrote pieces for a piano and four wind instruments (oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon in both cases). Although these pieces could be called piano quintets, they are more often referred to as "quintets for piano and wind" so as to distinguish them from pieces with the more usual instrumentation.

List of works

The following is a partial list of piano quintets by famous composers. All works are for piano and string quartet unless otherwise noted.

Further reading

  • Basil Smallman (1994) The Piano Quartet and Quintet: Style Structure, and Scoring, New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-816640-0.


This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Piano quintet". Allthough most Wikipedia articles provide accurate information accuracy can not be guaranteed.



Looking for classical mp3 downloads? We index the free-to-download classical mp3s on the internet. Go to our homepage to start your search.
©2006 Classic Cat - the classical music directory. All rights reserved.


Contact us