Piano Quintet (Shostakovich) Piano Quintet (Shostakovich) The Piano Quintet in G Minor, opus 57, by Dmitri Shostakovich is one of his best-known chamber works. Like most piano quintets, it is written for piano and string quartet (two violins, viola and cello). Shostakovich began work on the piece in the summer of 1940 and completed it on September 14. It was written for the Beethoven Quartet, as were most of his string quartets, and premiered by them with Shostakovich himself at the piano on November 23, 1940 at the Moscow Conservatory, to great success. In 1941, it was awarded the Stalin Prize. A typical
String Quintet (Bruckner) the frequent use of Sesto in the Ländler-like eighth-note of the first viola, which is due to the line of the second violin and the violoncello of the first part and refers directly to the trio in Scherzo. An airy counterpart of the first violin pushes playfully unstoppable upwards. The actual implementation theme becomes the starting point of a fugue whose theme is contrasted with a striking triplet figure. Finally, the recapitulation follows in D flat major. The coda is a jubilant conclusion. Josef Hellmesberger, on whose initiative the creation of the string quintet went back, rejected the Scherzo originally