Schubert - Piano Quintet 'The Trout' [Schiff/Hagen Quartet/ Posch]Schubert's Trout Quintet is a fun yet serious work, composed while on holiday on the Danube river town of Steyr in Austria, this was a happy time for Schubert.
The Quintet received the tag 'trout' for its use of a song Schubert composed about a trout fisherman, used in the variation 4th movement, the highlight of the work,
'I stood on the bank
and in sweet calm watched
the cheerful fish bathing
in the clear brooklet'
even though the words are composed by Stolberg, you can just imagine Schubert on the riverbank!.
I enjoyed the variations so much on this hearing, on the scan of the back insert i have a sticker with timings for the individual variations on the fourth movement, the theme is stated gently by the strings, and variation 1 introduces the piano trilling with string backup, my favourite moment is the variation 4, the lower and higher strings argue, while the piano stamps out the chords.
Here's the Amadeus String Quartet playing the fourth movement variations on YouTube, with Clifford Curzon on piano.
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