Schumann: Piano Quintet - Maggini Quartet and Julius Drake, Kings Place

Celebrated British pianist Julius Drake and the award-winning Maggini Quartet join forces to perform Schumann’s ravishing 1842 Piano Quintet. The Magginis also treat us to a hidden gem of the quartet repertoire by Ernest Moeran, and a work from the father of the genre, Haydn. 

Julius Drake is a specialist in chamber music. He’s worked with several prestigious singers, including Gerald Finley and Ian Bostridge. This concert, however, displays Drake in a different light. Instead of accompanying a solo singer he’ll take a leading role in Schumann’s Quintet in an ensemble of four other instrumentalists. Though there are chamber-like conversational episodes between the instruments, the Quintet cannot be regarded only as a chamber work. Passages where the combined forces of the strings are massed against the piano reach towards symphonic proportions. For Schumann, the piano quintet was a genre suspended between intimate chamber music and public symphonies.

Also not to be missed is this rare opportunity to hear Moeran’s String Quartet No. 1 in A minor. The Maggini Quartet is renowned for its performances of British repertoire, so we highly recommend hearing these experts play this rarely performed work. Moeran is not the best-known British composer, but the heavy influence of English and Irish folk-song in his work reveals him as following the same tradition as British composers Delius and Vaughan Williams. His Quartet in A minor, with its lyrical, folk-like melodies shows Moeran’s intimacy with the folksongs of his native East Anglia.

Haydn’s String Quartet Op. 55, No. 2 completes the programme. Whilst Haydn is credited with having set the conventions for the genre, Op. 55, No. 2 highlights how the composer was far from conventional himself. Its opening slow movement is striking. Not only does it unusually place the slow movement first, it’s also follows a theme and variations structure (where the opening melody is constantly recycled in new varied formats), a form normally reserved for the final movement. 

This mixture of staples and undiscovered gems of the quartet repertoire make this concert a highlight of the Chamber Music Unwrapped series hosted by Kings Place. Drake and the Maginis are sure to serve a chamber concert of delights.