Piano Quintet (2007)
Duration: 21:00
Instrumentation: 2 violins, viola, cello and piano
Premiere: May 22, 2007 at Watson Recital Hall in Cincinnati, OH by Michael Ippolito, piano, Nicholas Naegele, violin, Isaac Thompson, violin, Nicholas Jeffrey, viola, Michael Ronstadt, cello
Notes:
My Piano Quintet is a large-scale work in four movements, all about the relationship between piano and strings. While this is a standard instrumentation in chamber music and as such is easy to take for granted, there is a fundamental conflict in the ways that these instruments produce sound. String instruments can be bowed or plucked, can adjust tuning, and can easily change timbre with bow placement and pressure, among many other examples. Piano is by contrast fixed in its tuning and traditionally played on the keys (though one can play directly on the strings). These dfiferences interested me and each movement explores certain ways of highlighting of overcoming them.
The first movement is bast in a simple ABA form: the outer sections are obsessive repeated chords with hypnotic pizzicato scales and sliding glissandos and the middle sections is a brief wild explosion of energy. The second movement is a fast-paced kind of game: the piano and strings never play together, hocketing between each other until the final chord. The third movement is a flowing dance that explores muting: the strings playing with mutes and the piano playing with the soft pedal. The final movement brings together much of the previous material into a large rondo form in which the piano and strings finally coalesce into a single musical texture.