Heritage Concert: Forgotten Romantics

The Kotuku Quintet return to the stage this year with a programme that features two little-known works for piano quintet from the Romantic era. Frank Bridge’s Quintet in D minor, and Enrique Granados’ Quintet in G minor.

The English composer Frank Bridge (1879-1941) was widely respected as a teacher, composer, violist and conductor. His Quintet has been described as ‘a high-point of post-romantic English music’. Today it is hardly known but this fresh, enjoyable, moving work is well deserving of greater popularity. Spanish composer Enrique Granados (1867-1916), dubbed by some as the ‘Spanish Grieg’, wrote his Piano Quintet in G minor fairly early in his career and is one of only a handful of chamber works that he wrote. His distinctly Spanish style of classical music can be heard in the second movement, Allegretto, with the suggested strumming of a guitar, accompanying a melancholy song beautifully evocative of a lazy afternoon in the sun.