Hans Winterberg

Quintett

The period around the mid-1930s was a particularly fruitful and eventful time in Hans Winterberg's life. He wrote his first important orchestral compositions and chamber music works as well as his first piano sonata. Winterberg, born in Prague in 1901, a child prodigy as a pianist and a cautious composer, finally ventured into the great forms and genres of tradition, but also experimented with unusual combinations of instruments, as in his first chamber music work, the Quintet for Violin, 2 Clarinets, Violoncello and Piano. The eccentric instrumentation may come as a surprise, but Winterberg chose it deliberately because the clearly delineated color spectra of the instruments suited him in his experiments with the overlapping of independent rhythmic levels. With the Quintet, Winterberg succeeded completely in amalgamating the influence of Schönberg and Berg, passed on by his teacher Zemlinsky, with the characteristics of the Bohemian-Moorish tradition passed on by Janá?ek. The result is music of enormous inner tension and rhythmic drive.