performed by Trio Nota Bene with Shmuel Ashkenasi (violin) and Nobuko Imai (viola) – http://www.trionotabene.ch/index.php?nav=11&subnav=18&sub=1
00:00 I Allegro
08:31 II Scherzo. Allegro
13:43 III Adagio, quasi andante
20:14 IV Finale. Allegro animato
“Opus 1” in a musical oeuvre is rarely considered as a really significant piece of the given composer’s works. It seems that the Hungarian composer−pianist Ernst von (Ernő) Dohnányi (1877−1960) belongs to the few exceptions: his Piano Quintet in C Minor, op. 1, had always been one of his most popular works. Dohnányi’s case, however, is a rather special one. Firstly, because he was an extraordinarily mature musical talent at the age of 17 when this Quintet was written. (We should add, though, that “Opus 1” was preceded by a great amount of juvenile works.) And secondly, only in a special situation could a very first adult work from 1895 remain emblematic throughout a long, 20th-century musical career – namely if the compositional style did not change much, and if the composer used approximately the same post-romantic musical language in his whole life. Was Dohnányi an extreme conservative thinker, or simply an old-fashioned musician, or maybe a bravely independent creator? Whatever our judgment is, the fact is that his musical style seems to be somewhat anachronistic in its age, but at the same time, his works are of a very high quality. This stirring duality makes his person more and more interesting among the 21st-century music-lovers.
The Piano Quintet in C Minor was composed in Dohnányi’s first year at the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest. He arrived there as a brilliant talent from his hometown, Pozsony (then rather Pressburg, now Bratislava, Slovakia), where he grew up in an intellectual and harmonic bourgeois family. His father, who navigated the son’s life in a strict though gentle way, did not allow Ernst to become a child prodigy, and tried to give his fabulously talented boy an ordinary life as long as he could. This job, however, was not easy: the seventeen-year-old musician was enthusiastically praised by his teachers, colleagues and audience, and the Piano Quintet in C Minor was even acclaimed by Johannes Brahms, who allegedly said that “nobody could write it better, neither did I”. Brahms’s reputed laudation became a crucial point in the reception of the Quintet: contemporary critics alongside with their recent colleagues agree that the piece is strongly influenced by Brahms, see for example its captivatingly intense and thick beginning. But it is not the only German maestro who appears in the young Dohnányi’s musical world. The greatest Hungarian composer, Béla Bartók, as a few-year younger friend and rival of Dohnányi drew attention to many reminiscences of the piece in a personal letter such as resemblances to certain Schumann- or Wagner-pieces. He must be right but these similarities do not really infect the genuineness of the piece: the almost combatively passionate climax of the main theme, the strikingly intimate tone of the second theme in the relative major, or the many enchantingly instrumentated moments (such as the pizzicato strings above the piano mixtures in the second theme) all seem to be deeply “true” for the listener. The only weaker point of the movement is provably its ending: the triumphant recapitulation of the major transformation of the first theme. Movements II and III, a volatile Scherzo and a perfectly-written Adagio, quasi andante also show well the young Dohnányi’s unforced link to the late-Romantic tradition. The finale is a large-scale musical buildup which is dominated by a youthfully dynamic main theme, full of exhilaration, and which ends, as a summary, with the Beethovenian recapitulations of some earlier themes of the previous movements
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