Piano quintet

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A piano quintet is a chamber musical ensemble made up of one piano and four other instruments or 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.

Many composers have written piano quintets, although few have written more than one--an 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] Further reading

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