Customer Reviews

Leo Ornstein: Piano Quintet: String Quartet No. 3

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This piece blew me away from the first beat to the last. It will grab you in the first five seconds, and it doesn't let go over three movements totalling nearly 40 minutes. The musical language is a super-saturated blend of early Stravinsky (think "Rite of Spring" compressed into five instruments) and Rachmaninoff on amphetamines. Ornstein's original contributions (and it IS an original work) are his extraordinary melodic thrust and a canny control of just how many notes to add to a harmonic field and still keep it focused and directional. Many chords contain nearly all twelve pitches, but this is NOT atonal music. Ornstein's inspiration is also evident in the rhythmic energy, which is nonstop yet always under control and modulated in masterly fashion. Imagine the propulsion of a Beethoven fast movement sustained -- even through slow music -- for nearly forty minutes. This is late romantic music ON THE EDGE. Written in 1927, at the end of that fabulous "anything-goes" era when romanticism inspired modernism (think Bartok, the early Russian modernists before they were suppressed, the recently rediscovered Igor Markevitch, and the Stravinsky of the large earlier works), this work compresses tonal music to near-black-hole density. The accompanying string quartet, written nearly 50 years later, is warmer and more autumnal and somewhat more astringent, from a master musician who continued to produce passionate and large-scale creations well into his 90s.

A very savvy clerk in a record store turned me on to Ornstein's Piano Quintet, urging me to buy the recording. I resisted for a few days, then took the plunge. The music roared out of my speakers with such verve and radiance that I was swept away. I know of no mid to late 20th century chamber work with such instant and enduring appeal. The String Quintet that completes the disc is certainly attractive, but not nearly as memorable as the astounding Piano Quintet. Leo Ornstein was still alive when this was recorded (around 1997), at which time he was living in Green Bay, Wisconsin, at the age of 104. Does anyone reading this know whether he is still with us? Regardless, get this recording. Its combination of Slavic longing and romantic rapture will stay with you long after listening.

I agree with all the other reviewers...while the string quartet is strangely beautiful and even haunting in parts, the piano quintet on this disc is huge, passionate, brimming over with such intensity and such wonderful displays of tension and release that i felt emotionally and physically exhausted after listening to it the first time...it is fully the equal or even better than any of the other great romantic piano quintets, including those of Edward Elgar, Louis Vierne, Cesar Franck, and Ernest Bloch (HIS first piano quintet is also amazing!)

Leo Ornstein passed away February 24, 2002 in Green Bay, Wis.
He was 108 or 109.

"Fame never had much meaning or appeal to me," Mr. Ornstein told Harold C. Schonberg of The Times in 1976. "It is not worth it. If my music has any value, it will be picked up and played. If it has no value, it deserves its neglect."

Lovely to hear such valuable music being played.