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Piano Quintets on CD

Premiered in 1919 in Zurich by the leaders of string sections of the Tonhalle Orchestra with Frank Martin himself at the piano, it displays a wide variety of influences, all forming part of a 29-year-old musician's search for his own artistic voice. At the same time, the Quintet's style is thoroughly individual, notably in it's choice of rich harmonies. Providing a marked contrast to Frank Martin's filigree, pared-down early style, César Franck's profuse, monumental Piano Quintet in F Minor (1879) is typical of the Franco-Belgian composer's late output. All of Franck's characteristics seem to blend together in this work which he wrote at the age of 57: Wagnerian chromatic harmonies, dramatic developments similar to those we know from his symphonic poems and oratorios, and a polyphonic musical thinking "in organ registers"