Product Description

Designed as a companion volume to the author's acclaimed earlier study, The Piano Trio, this book surveys the development of the piano quartet and quintet from their beginnings in the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. Developments during the first four decades of the nineteenth century resulted not only in Schubert's renowned Trout Quintet, but also in works of much brilliance by Dussek, Hummel, Weber, and others in which the piano predominates in a concerto-like role. Subsequently, Schumann's epoch-making quintet of 1842 initiated a broadly "symphonic" style, with large-scale structures and closely integrated textures, which was taken up by many later composers, including Brahms, Dvorak, Cesar Franck, Faure, and Elgar. The author also examines the numerous changes in the nature of the genres which have occurred in recent times, and gives special consideration to a number of works by leading twentieth-century composers, in which "mixed" media are formed by combining wind instruments with the normal strings-and-piano ensembles.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4952123 in Books
• Published on: 1994-12-08
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 208 pages

Review

"Another substantial and elegantly written survey....The author's deep familiarity with the repretoire is apparent throughout, and his accessible style renders the book suitable for a broad range of readers."--Choice

About the Author
Basil Smallman is at Liverpool University.

Customer Reviews

Companion volume to The Piano Trio
Basil Smallman's guide, which deals principally with chamber music scored for piano and either three or four other stringed instruments, is a successor volume to his earlier guide to the piano trio. The first, short chapter of the present volume traces the history of concerted chamber music with piano up through Mozart. Then, as in the companion volume, the successive chapters follow a mostly chronological path, with representative works examined at greater length. There is a useful discussion of scoring techniques, and how differing artistic aims by composers influence their choice of instrumentation and distribution of musical materials.

It is a predictable and not unwelcome feature of the book that the major works by the great nineteenth-century composers, Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak among them, receive the most attention and analysis. As in Smallman's previous survey, one may take issue elsewhere with what is dwelt on and what is given but a passing glance. The author's decision to include music written for still larger combinations, as well as mixed ensembles of strings, winds and piano, inevitably means a more diffuse discussion than in the book on the piano trio, and the end in particular sees the author on the verge of rhetorically throwing up his hands and declaring the genre dead. Until then, however, there is much informative and enjoyable reading to be had. The only significant drawback is the relative paucity of extended musical examples: many of the individual analyses need numbered full scores in order to be fully digested.