Schumann's piano quintet

I managed to arrange a performance of the Schumann piano quintet here in California just before I fly to Madison. It's great when this kind of thing works out—it means that the BDDS rehearsal process can start at a higher level and the resulting performance can have even greater conviction. I first played this piece my first year of grad school, and I didn't entirely get it. (I had a troubled relationship with Schumann's music for a long time. Look at the article I wrote in our most recent newsletter.) Now, however, I think it's pretty fantastic—the gold standard of piano quintets. It really doesn't get any better than this. And what I'm noticing now is that many of the distinctive features of this quintet show up in all the other major quintets. If not always a model for later quintets, it certainly was inspiration for them.

We're playing it on Friday in San Francisco and Saturday in Portola Valley together with the Shostakovich quintet, another great piece. (And one we need to bring back to BDDS sometime soon...)