Piacere Piano Quintet offer musical rarities in Bognor Regis

The challenge of the Piano Quintets by Coleridge Taylor Op 1 and Saint Saëns No 1, Op 14 is immense but equally rewarding, says violinist Inna Erskine. You can catch them at the Regis School of Music on Sunday, November 17 at 3pm. The works are also being performed in Haslemere on November 16. Tickets are available via EventBrite on https://tinyurl.com/484n3f5v

Inna explained: “Saint Saëns dedicated the piece to his great aunt who lived with them and who gave him his first piano lessons. I think (Piacere Piano Quintet pianist) Susie Renshaw will agree with me in saying that it is nothing short of a piano concerto accompanied by a string quartet. It is an immense work and it is phenomenally beautiful. It has the most striking beginning and is a cyclical work. The theme in the opening movement is repeated throughout the work in the most incredible way.

“The Saint Saëns will be the second half, and the first half will be the piece by Coleridge Taylor who was named after the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was a violinist and he went to study violin and composition at the age of 15 at the Royal College of Music but later switched composing as his first study. Mostly he composed choral works and he was hailed as the African Mahler after a particularly successful tour of America. He died of pneumonia at the age of 37. Goodness knows what else he would have written if he had had a longer life.

“I was listening to all the piano quintets. And there is not a lot of them but I listened to all that I could find and this one just grabbed my attention. And I knew that we had to play the two. They complement each other beautifully, and they are incredibly exciting to play. There are moments in them, even though I know them inside out, that reduce me to tears. They are so beautifully put together.”

Piacere Piano Quintet became a quintet only fairly recently after working for a number of years under the Piacere brand.

“Since Covid I have been street busking. I took music out into the high street and busking has been one of my favourite, favourite things to do because you can reach people who would not usually come to a concert. And through busking I met the musical director at Butlins who invited me to join Symphonic Ibiza. We play as between a 16 and 24-piece orchestra with a DJ and singers and I have done that over the last three years very, very regularly.

“But really I wanted to play some real music in inverted commas and get back to my classical roots. Piacere means to play with pleasure and that's really what we do. It is a new line-up from the spring of this year. The quintet pianist Susie is one of my oldest and dearest friends. We have known each other since we were 12. Piano quintets are not often performed and we really wanted to do something together that was a little bit less usual. String quintets are quite often pulled together but this is something that you won't hear so much.”