A Weekend of Piano Quintets, October 2025

16 October:

Heading off from Sydney by road later this morning to the Hunter Valley for our final Hayllar Music Tours chamber music weekend for this year.

The Art of the Piano Quintet will feature some of the greatest works in the quintet repertoire (and some talks by yours truly). Our artists are pianist Daniel de Borah and Spanish string quartet Cuarteto Quiroga.

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Day 1 of The Art of the Piano Quintet - Thursday - saw us arrive at Spicers Guesthouse in the Hunter Valley mid-afternoon. This is such a beautiful place, a regular venue for our chamber music weekends over the past few years.

After a drinks reception I gave my first talk to our guests. A little later, in the early evening, we had our first opportunity to hear our resident artists - Daniel de Borah and Cuarteto Quiroga - in the first concert.

The program opened with the Granados Piano Quintet, an appropriate choice of Spanish music in honour of our Spanish guests. I'd never heard this work live before and it was a fantastic way to start our immersion in the piano quintet repertoire.

This was followed by one of the core works of the quintet repertoire, the Brahms Piano Quintet. A monster of a piece, the immense challenges of the work were met with incredible finesse and passion by all five musicians. Honestly, I've never heard Brahms played like this. It was gripping, almost irreverently so, and I loved it. So did our guests by the sound of the comments afterwards!

We all - guests and musicians - then had a wonderful dinner together. We're off!

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17 October:

The second day - Friday - of this Hayllar Music Tours chamber music weekend started with my second talk for our guests. We then heard Daniel de Borah and Cuarteto Quiroga perform the second movement of Dvořák's Op 81 Piano Quintet. This was followed by an interview/chat in which I spoke to Daniel and Cibrán Sierra, the quartet's second violin.

It was Daniel and Cibrán's meeting and collaboration in Montreal last year which led to the quartet being invited to take part in this weekend. Other engagements were arranged in Adelaide, Brisbane and Sydney to make a tour of this distance feasible. Both of these wonderful musicians shared some extraordinary and beautiful insights into their craft in the course of our conversation.

We then headed off by coach to a nearby restaurant, Amanda's on the Edge, for a fabulous lunch.

Our evening concert showcased the incredible talents of our five artists in two contrasting works (accompanied, for a while, by a passing thunderstorm). The first was Mozart's A major piano concerto K414, given in its reduced "chamber" version. This is one of a set of three concertos in which the composer wrote the orchestral accompaniment in such a way as to make the wind parts optional and the strings playable one-to-a-part (ie: by a string quartet). It was fascinating to hear this familiar work in a "new" guise, and also to hear Daniel play the solo part so elegantly and stylishly.

The second work was another of the "pillars" of the quintet repertoire, that of Shostakovich. What a piece, and what a performance! As with last night's Brahms, this dynamic masterpiece was given a riveting and thoroughly convincing performance. Powerful, eerie, mad, wistful...it was all there.

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18 October:

And so we end Day 3 - Saturday - the final day of this Hayllar Music Tours chamber music weekend devoted to piano quintets.

After my third talk to our guests this morning we heard a real rarity performed by Cuarteto Quiroga and Daniel de Borah: the slow movement of Sergei Taneyev's piano quintet, completed in 1911.

This composer is known and revered in his native Russia, but his music is hardly played elsewhere. He was a true genius, completely removed from the mainstream of Russian Romanticism. His style was more academic, less emotional, but highly polished and truly fascinating.

After the performance I led an interview/chat with Aitor Hevia, Josep Puchades and Helena Poggio, the quartet's first violin, viola and cello respectively. Here again we had the chance to learn more about the careers and backgrounds of these marvellous musicians.

We then headed off to a wine tasting at Mount Pleasant winery.

Our evening concert yet again gave us two wildly contrasting works. Cuarteto Quiroga started on their own, without Daniel, playing the first string quartet of Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera. What a wild, virtuoso ride this was! I was in awe of the skill and energy on display as our Spanish guests delivered a knock-out performance of this terrifyingly difficult piece.

Then to conclude our weekend of sublime performances Daniel rejoined the string players to give us the Schumann piano quintet. A famous work, of course, but one here given a totally fresh, powerful airing. This was breathtaking, gripping stuff.

Later we all went to Hunters Quarter restaurant for our farewell dinner. We had the opportunity there to thank our five amazing musicians for not only their superb virtuosity but also their generosity and genuine friendship with all of us. It's been such a privilege.

And tomorrow, home to Adelaide.

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19 October:

I'm home now after our Art of the Piano Quintet weekend.

I'm sitting here with a glass of wine thinking about the past few days.

I know I rave about the experiences I'm privileged to have as a tour leader for Hayllar Music Tours. But seriously...I'm running out of words...

I get to hear some of the greatest musicians in the world on a regular basis playing some of the greatest music ever conceived. It's easy to get blasé. But sometimes I encounter a set of circumstances which goes beyond good, beyond fabulous, beyond brilliant. Goodness, fabulousness and brilliance set the standard but the experiences of the past few days...? It was beyond all that.

I'm proud - honoured - to call Daniel de Borah a friend. I experience his artistry regularly in our chamber music weekends and also in the Bendigo Chamber Music Festival each year. But his collaboration this weekend with Cuarteto Quiroga was on another plane of musical power, communication, energy.

Take last night, for example. The ensemble played the Schumann piano quintet. A great work, a thrilling work, no-one denies that. But I confess I've fallen asleep in the slow movement when I've heard it before. I confess I've found the finale just weird and rambling.

Not last night. These musicians found something in this piece that I've never experienced before. I was gripped. I felt captured - happily - by this disturbed genius creating "ground zero" for the piano quintet as a form. I understood why all subsequent piano quintets look back to this 1842 master work as their touchstone.

And I felt this "being grabbed by the heart" sensation with everything Cuarteto Quiroga and Daniel performed (outlined in my previous posts). I've heard great chamber music, and often, in my life. But this was different. I feel changed.

I know it sounds corny as fuck but that's what was buzzing through my head on the plane home this afternoon. Bits of the Schumann on repeat, memories of Shostakovich and Brahms and all the rest. Cuarteto Quiroga and Daniel de Borah created something - and I hate this overused word but here goes - magical. And I'm happy to have been changed by their spell.

First posted on Facebook