Piano Quintet No. 2 in A Major

As a viola player, Dvořák loved and composed chamber music throughout his life. But he never wrote anything grander or more exuberantly generous with its ideas and emotions than his Piano Quintet. It wasn’t his first attempt at combining a string quartet with a piano; he’d written (and promptly shelved) an earlier effort 15 years earlier. Then, in the summer of 1887, he felt it was worth a second pass, and retreating to his country home at Vysoká, southwest of Prague, he began to revise the work. In the rural quiet, among his children and his pet pigeons, the revision escalated into a completely new Piano Quintet in four movements—sweeping outpourings of melody, brightened by splashes of the Bohemian dance-rhythms that were never far from Dvořák’s musical imagination. The first, “Allegro, ma non tanto”, begins with cello and piano singing alone—Dvořák often deploys his five players in smaller and more intimate combinations. The second movement is a “Dumka”—a Slav folkdance that alternates lamenting and dancing. The third is a “Furiant”, a leaping Czech dance driven by fiery cross-rhythms (though the central section is idyllic). And, finally, Dvořák cuts loose with a laughing, headlong finale that he headed “Allegro”, though anyone in Vysoká would have recognised the main theme as a reel-like skočna: music to delight head, heart and toes alike.