Listening to Schubert's Quintet

[Dave2002]

How do others react to Schubert's string quintet?

At a performance last night, after experiencing initial pleasure I started contemplating "heavenly length" and even began to wish that I was listening to one or more of Webern's short works. However, by the third and fourth movements my view was shifting, and the overall performance worked for me - just about. There was an encore of another piece by Boccherini, in recognition of our enthusiastic applause - including mine.

It really was an excellent performance, by the Cuarteto Casals plus Nicolas Alstädt at Tetbury - but I wonder if others also have a love hate relationship with this work. Also, according to the programme notes, the second movement is the most frequent request for classical music on Desert Island Discs!

Audiences at Tetbury seem to be down a bit this year - which is a real shame. I hope they pick up. http://www.tetburymusicfestival.org.uk/Events.aspx

[richardfinegold]

How do others react to Schubert's quintet?

At a performance last night, after experiencing initial pleasure I started contemplating "heavenly length" and even began to wish that I was listening to one or more of Webern's short works. However, by the third and fourth movements my view was shifting, and the overall performance worked for me - just about. There was an encore of another piece by Boccherini, in recognition of our enthusiastic applause - including mine.

It really was an excellent performance, by the Cuarteto Casals plus Nicolas Alstädt at Tetbury - but I wonder if others also have a love hate relationship with this work. Also, according to the programme notes, the second movement is the most frequent request for classical music on Desert Island Discs!

Audiences at Tetbury seem to be down a bit this year - which is a real shame. I hope they pick up. http://www.tetburymusicfestival.org.uk/Events.aspx

I assume that you are referring to the String Quintet with Two Cellists, and not the Trout Quintet. If so, I think the length of the piece is justified by it's ethereal beauty--I for one could listen to it forever--but it probably does take some special level of Muscianship for the second movement, which is probably the one you are referring to in your "heavenly length" comment. The one time I heard it live the musicians terraced their phrasing and dynamics in II in such a way to keep it from dragging. Many of the recordings that I have heard of the piece do not do so.

[EdgeleyRob]

Whenever I listen to this most beautiful of all chamber works,I don't want it to end.

[Beef Oven!]

Whenever I listen to this most beautiful of all chamber works,I don't want it to end.

If it's a CD, put it on repeat.

[Tapiola]

You guys must be made of stronger stuff than this mere half-Celt. I can hardly bear to listen to it any more. It bores into the soul.

[richardfinegold]

Whenever I listen to this most beautiful of all chamber works,I don't want it to end.

:

ok:

[pastoralguy]

Whenever I listen to this most beautiful of all chamber works,I don't want it to end.

[EdgeleyRob]

If it's a CD, put it on repeat.

Brilliant idea Beefmeister general.

[Padraig]

One of the wonders, to my ear, of chamber music; and I think not wanting it to end must be its secret ingredient. My first tape of Stern, Tortelier, Casals, Schneider and Katims was updated more recently by The Lindsays/Douglas Cummings. It just keeps getting better.

[pastoralguy]

One of the wonders, to my ear, of chamber music; and I think not wanting it to end must be its secret ingredient. My first tape of Stern, Tortelier, Casals, Schneider and Katims was updated more recently by The Lindsays/Douglas Cummings. It just keeps getting better.

The late, great Mr. Douglas Cummings. Ex-principal 'cellist of the LSO.

[Beef Oven!]

Brilliant idea Beefmeister general.

[cloughie]

Whenever I listen to this most beautiful of all chamber works,I don't want it to end.

I'm there with you edge - there are some works, not many that just get you that way!

[richardfinegold]

One of the wonders, to my ear, of chamber music; and I think not wanting it to end must be its secret ingredient. My first tape of Stern, Tortelier, Casals, Schneider and Katims was updated more recently by The Lindsays/Douglas Cummings. It just keeps getting better.

My first was the Melos Qt with Slava. My other recording is the Emersons with Slava. I really must add a version without Slava.

[Richard Barrett]

I can never get enough of this work, every time I hear it I experience new perspectives I've never come across before even though by now I know it in quite some detail.

Those who are tiring of it might give a listen to the HIPP recording by the Féstetics Quartet with Wieland Kuijken. For me Schubert's music more than Beethoven's (and this applies to piano music as well as chamber music) benefits from this kind of performance on instruments of the time because it's so focused on texture (rather than for example counterpoint), whose effect is so to speak immersive rather than discursive, that is to say it's not "too long", it just modulates our experience of time in a different way, which is something you probably have to put yourself "in tune" with.

Now: I'm away from home and I don't have my score with me to give more precise reference points, but I wonder if anyone else has the same feeling as I do, that the finale seems somehow to be as if attracted towards a recapitulation of the first subject (the forte broken-chord element of it anyway) but is always deflected away just before it gets there.

[Barbirollians]

Classic performance for me - as much as i love the Stern,Tortelier Casals etc combo - Chilingirian Quartet with Jennifer Ward-Clarke on CFP