The Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 57 by Dmitri Shostakovich is one of his best-known chamber works. Like most piano quintets, it is written for piano and string quartet (two violins, viola and cello).

Shostakovich began work on the piece in the summer of 1940 and completed it on September 14. It was written for the Beethoven Quartet, as were most of his string quartets, and premiered by them with Shostakovich himself at the piano on November 23, 1940 at the Moscow Conservatory, to great success.^[1] In 1941, it was awarded the Stalin Prize.

A typical performance of the quintet runs slightly more than 30 minutes.

Structure

The quintet is in five movements:

Some notable recordings

• Dmitri Shostakovich with the Beethoven Quartet (1950)
• Victor Aller with the Hollywood String Quartet (1953)
• Dmitri Shostakovich with the Beethoven Quartet (1960)
• Glenn Gould with the Symphonia Quartet (1961)
• Władysław Szpilman as a member of the Warsaw Piano Quintet (1966)
• Radu Lupu with the Gabrieli Quartet (1973, live)
• Sviatoslav Richter with the Borodin Quartet (1983)
• Vladimir Ashkenazy with the Fitzwilliam Quartet (1983)
• Yefim Bronfman with the Julliard String Quartet (2003)
• Martha Argerich with string quartet (2006)
• Marc-André Hamelin with the Takács Quartet (2015)
• Elisabeth Leonskaja with the Artemis Quartet (2019)

References

External links

• Classical Net Review
• Boosey and Hawkes page
• 1947 recording with D. Shostakovich and the Beethoven Quartet

This article about a composition for a chamber music group is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

• v
• t
• e