String Quintet No. 2 (Brahms) String Quintet No. 2 (Brahms) String Quintet No. 2 in G major, Op. 111, is a work by Johannes Brahms published in 1890. It is known as the "Prater" Quintet. Brahms intended it to be his last piece of music, though he later produced a number of piano pieces and the two sonatas for clarinet or viola and piano. The first performance of the Quintet in Vienna on November 11, 1890 was a sensation (Swafford 1997, p. 568). Like Brahms' earlier string quintet, Opus 88, it is a viola quintet, scored for two violins, two violas and cello. The work
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