Piano Quintet (Oswald) Piano Quintet (Oswald) The Piano Quintet in C major, Op. 18, by Henrique Oswald was finished in 1895. Like most of the piano quintets after the Schumann's, it is scored for piano, 2 violins, viola and cello. A typical performance takes 27–31 minutes. The quintet was composed by Oswald during the last decade of his Italian period. He has already composed the Piano Quartet No. 1, Op. 5 (1888), the Piano Trio in G minor, Op. 9 (1889) and two string quartets, thus proving to be a confident composer of chamber music. However, none of these compositions were printed during
Piano Quintet (Schumann) and dynamic range. Bringing the piano and string quartet together, Schumann's Piano Quintet takes full advantage of the expressive possibilities of these forces in combination, alternating conversational passages between the five instruments with concertante passages in which the combined forces of the strings are massed against the piano. At a time when chamber music was moving out of the salon and into public concert halls, Schumann reimagines the piano quintet as a musical genre "suspended between private and public spheres" alternating between "quasi-symphonic and more properly chamber-like elements." The piece contains four movements in the standard fast-slow-scherzo-fast pattern: The tempo