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Late Romantic Piano Quintets

“… We only have two hands, and our ten fingers are not capable of exploiting all the possibilities”: that is how composer Frank Martin (1890-1974) once described the inadequacies of the keyboard. However, pianist Martin Klett and the members of the Armida Quartet view things somewhat differently. Similarly to the string quartet as a whole ensemble, the piano forms “a perfect unit in itself”, Klett affirms.

And the musical genre of the piano quintet has its own special charm, owing to that autonomy and independence of its two main elements. According to Klett, the piano quintet is ”the perfect line-up in chamber music”, since “the two components have a wide spectrum of sonorities at their disposal, enabling them to bring out all the timbre qualities we know from chamber as well as orchestral music, from the most intimate sonorities imaginable to the dense amassment of sound we encounter in a symphony!”

The five musicians on this recording savor every nuance of the line-up in which they are involved; in so doing, they are able to highlight the two highly different musical personalities of Frank Martin and César Franck (1822-1890), each of whom approached the genre from thoroughly different angles. Frank Martin viewed César Franck, two generations his elder, as an important master: “the first musician [...] who enabled me to disengage myself from Classical music”, as he remarked in retrospect.

Born in Geneva, Frank Martin would eventually become a true “outsider of new music”; his Piano Quintet, one of his early works, still bears the traces of the “Classical” tradition as well as of the legacy of his musical predecessor César Franck. What did Frank Martin mean by “Classical”? For him, it was clear: “J’étais dans Bach, encore dans Bach et dans Bach toujours...” (“I was fully into Bach, and still into Bach, and always into Bach”).
(Excerpts from the liner notes)