Piano Quintets

In its very first thematic series (released in the 1990s), eda records dedicated itself to presenting a total of six recordings in the piano quintet genre, many of which were the first to ever be recorded worldwide. The Finnish-German PIHITPUDAS KVINTETTI (Pihtipudas Piano Quintet), artistic partners of eda records in this project, is the only professional chamber ensemble to date which works exclusively in this line-up. In 2013, it celebrated the 25th anniversary of its founding. Since then, the renowned formation hasn’t just focused on the main pieces in its repertoire – far from it. Instead, it has dedicated much of its activity to unearthing a wide variety of little-known and forgotten works, thus enriching the piano quintet genre with its discoveries and recordings in a highly original manner. The fact that Anton Rubinstein was Russian is indisputable from a purely genealogical perspective, but he can hardly be described as a Russian composer in the way a present-day music listener would understand it. Anton and his brother had their (Silesian) mother to thank for recognising their musical talent and sparing them from a career in business. Anton started out studying piano under the renowned Villoing in Moscow, and it wasn’t long before he was passed around as piano genius. Paris and London were among the stations in his triumph as a performer before he finally landed in Berlin and came to know and love the music of German Romanticism. As a result, he was barred from the Russian composer schools. And while this did not dispel his recognition, he became much better known as a pianist than as a composer, even though his body of work was prolific. By establishing the conservatories in St. Petersburg and Moscow, Rubinstein laid the foundation for the training of instrumentalists in Russia, which remains first-class to this day. His wrote his piano quintet in 1876, which was naturally a veritable piece of virtuosity – for the piano. But it also offered plenty for the strings to do. The result: a work rich in melody with a wealth of ideas. Shostakovich, in contrast, certainly is a Russian composer, as well as a political chronicler and commentator on the tide of events over the 20th century. The way he conveyed his emotions in his 15 string quartets is nothing short of legendary; the fact that he composed at least a single piano quintet is thanks to his friendship with the Beethoven Quartet, an early formation of the Moscow Conservatory which sought to finally appear together with Shostakovich after having debuted several of his quartets. The time had come in 1940; according to historical sources, the debut was an extraordinarily great success – and two movements even had to be repeated. And it ended up winning Shostakovich the Stalin Award, which came with a prize of no less than 100,000 roubles, which at that time was an astronomical sum for a work of music. In sharp contrast to Rubinstein’s approach, Shostakovich used the piano part as a voice which was not intended to dominate his score. In so doing, he created one of the first works of this genre which was suited to a chamber musician instead of a piano virtuoso – in this case, himself.