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) performance with the Hellmesberger Quartet (Josef Hellmesberger sen., Josef Hellmesberger junior [each violin], Josef) took place on January 8, 1884 Maxintsak [viola], H. Kupka [viola], Ferdinand Hellemsberger [violoncello]). Bruckner initially found no publisher for his new work: "All efforts of the master and his admirers to find a publisher in Vienna, were unsuccessful". The efforts of the conductor Hans Richter to find a publisher in England also failed. Only the Bruckner pupil Josef Schalk reached with the Viennese publisher Alfred Gutmann a publication of the string quintet, whereby at the same time Schalk's own four-handed piano version as well as