Search - Bartschi Werner :: Schmitt-Quintette Pour Piano et Ocrdes Op.51

Schmitt's Infamous Quintet...

Sébastien Melmoth | Hôtel d'Alsace, PARIS | 06/22/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

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Florent Schmitt's morbid and innervating b-minor Piano Quintet (1908) reflects the tenebrous undercurrent of the late-Fin de Siècle which was simultaneously overlaid with the more blithe aspects of the Belle Époque.



Schmitt's Quintet shares this macabe ambience with contemporaneous works such as Dukas' eb-minor Sonata, Magnard's e-minor Quartet and Vierne's Organ Symphonies--these preceeded in esthetic by Franck's abstruse f-minor Quintet of a quarter-century earlier.

Dukas: Piano Sonata; Decaux; Clairs de Lune

Quatuor Op.16-Sonate Pour Violoncelle Op.2

Louis Vierne: Complete Organ Symphonies

Franck-Pierne-Quintettes Pour Piano et Cordes-Akik



Florent Schmitt (b.1870, year of the Franco-Prussian War), was from Lorraine near Nancy: this may account for his Teutonic-sounding surname--(the troubled department of Lorraine originally having been German land annexed by Louis XIV in the 17th Century, later re-captured by Germans in the 19th Century).



After WWII, Schmitt was criticized for having been a Vichyite; but had not the Vichy government reached a concordance with the Germans in June of 1940, the entire country would have overrun instead of only half of it.

Everything dwells in a twilight zone of half-factors.



In any case, Schmitt held the Prix de Rome (1900) and the Ordre national de la Légion d'honneur (1952), which goes to prove that each Frenchman loves France in his own way: vive la différence!



Schmitt's Quintet is a tripartite work of three monstrous movements (lent et grave, lent, and animé) each over a quarter-hour's duration. TT:>:55mins.



The work begins in a quasi-Brucknerian miasma of b-minor, and proceeds via bizarre harmonic changes of key to include Cb, Db, c#-minor, and f-minor, ending resolutely in b-minor. The textures are massive, but in the genre of the Piano Quintet, the string quartet ensemble can hold its own with the piano--(whereas in Piano Trios and Quartets, this is generally not the case).



This is a very rare recording reissued on Accord's collection musique Française series. As we are unlikely to get a reading of Schmitt's late g#-minor String Quartet, collectors would be advised to catch this disc while available.

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Also:

Sonate Libre Pour Violon et Piano-Ombres

Quatuor Op.16-Sonate Pour Violoncelle Op.2

(Magnard's Violin Sonata reissue already out of print again:)

MAGNARD : Sonate Pour Violon - Pièces Pour Piano - Zimansky / Keller

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