SCHUMANN QUINTET in E flat Major for piano and string quartet
I was 17 when I first heard the Schumann Quintet. It was an epiphany. I rushed out to buy the score, determined to run away to Paris and make my fortune as an itinerant chamber musician. It only took a few weeks for the more obvious absurdities of the plan to dawn on me: I had no money for a ticket, I had nowhere to stay in Paris, and I couldn't play the third movement of the quintet. But my devotion to this piece has never wavered and to this day when I hear it, it is with the excitement of my first time.
I still can't play the third movement of the Schumann Quintet, but most good pianists can and some great ones have recorded it as you will hear below.
Schumann is reported to have composed the work over a period of a few weeks in 1842. Aside from an early piano quartet written while he was still in his teens, Schumann had written no chamber music prior to 1842, a year known as his "Chamber Music Year" during which we wrote three string quartets, a piano trio, a piano quartet and this magnificent quintet.
It is dramatic, passionate, exquisitely melodic, perfectly crafted, in short, an outpouring of musical emotion, perhaps creating in a burst of creative energy the grand romantic tradition. But it was the second movement that turned me into a lunatic in 1965.
Here are seven complete performances of the Schumann Quintet. The pianists represented are Martha Argerich, Arthur Rubinstein, Sviatoslav Richter, whose recordings are my favorites of the group, Leonard Bernstein and Alicia de Larrocha. There is also a very interesting one by Rami Bar-Niv, an israeli pianist, and an anonymous recording, also very interesting.
We also have a wonderful recording of the first movement by Ossip Gabrilowitsch and the Flonzaley Quartet, a fine recording of the second movement by Hélène Grimaud and a breathtaking performance of the final movement by Artur Schnabel.
