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The Piano Quartet and Quintet: Style, Structure, and Scoring

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Basil Smallman's guide, which deals principally with chamber music scored for piano and either three or four other stringed instruments, is a successor volume to his earlier guide to the piano trio. The first, short chapter of the present volume traces the history of concerted chamber music with piano up through Mozart. Then, as in the companion volume, the successive chapters follow a mostly chronological path, with representative works examined at greater length. There is a useful discussion of scoring techniques, and how differing artistic aims by composers influence their choice of instrumentation and distribution of musical materials.

It is a predictable and not unwelcome feature of the book that the major works by the great nineteenth-century composers, Brahms, Schumann and Dvorak among them, receive the most attention and analysis. As in Smallman's previous survey, one may take issue elsewhere with what is dwelt on and what is given but a passing glance. The author's decision to include music written for still larger combinations, as well as mixed ensembles of strings, winds and piano, inevitably means a more diffuse discussion than in the book on the piano trio, and the end in particular sees the author on the verge of rhetorically throwing up his hands and declaring the genre dead. Until then, however, there is much informative and enjoyable reading to be had. The only significant drawback is the relative paucity of extended musical examples: many of the individual analyses need numbered full scores in order to be fully digested.