Title: Quintet in E Flat Major, Op. 97
Description: The String Quintet in E♭ major, Op. 97, B. 180, was composed by Antonín Dvořák during the summer he spent in Spillville, Iowa in 1893. It is a "Viola Quintet" in that it is scored for string quartet with an extra viola. It was completed in just over a month, immediately after he wrote his American String Quartet. Like the Quartet, the Quintet finely captures the inflection of Dvořák's Bohemian idiom with American inspirations. The Quintet was premiered by the Kneisel Quartet in New York on 13 January 1894 along with the second performance of the Quartet and very favorably reviewed, as comparable to Mozart. - Wikipedia.

The Quintet in E flat major is a work of rare originality, and its dazzling impact ensured it a permanent place among Dvorak's most successful compositions. In contrast to his previous quartet, here, the extended instrumental setting makes for a more colourful and more vibrant expression. The quintet also reflects the environment in which it originated: in addition to the attributes which are typical for Dvorak's American oeuvre in general - the pentatonic scale, syncopated rhythms, minor seventh in a minor key - we will hear shades of Native American folklore which lend this piece its unique colour. This particularly applies to the "drum" rhythm derived from the rhythmical accompaniment to Indian ritual song. (At the time Dvorak was spending his summer in Spillville, the village was visited by a group of Iroquois Indians who offered some of their artefacts for sale; they also performed traditional music and dance as part of their promotion. Dvorak was enchanted by these performances and, for the duration of their stay in the village, he apparently attended every one.) Like the previous Quartet in F major, the quintet also distances itself significantly from the trends in European chamber music at that time, above all, in the frequent exposition of the unison melody on its own, without additional contrapuntal voices and even without any harmonic texture. Thus, in certain passages, the whole musical image is reduced to a striking ostinato rhythm and "bare" melodic line - a clear echo of Indian song in unison accompanied by primitive drum rhythms. Authority on Dvorak's chamber oeuvre, musicologist Hartmut Schick, comments on this original aspect of the work in the following words: "It is music which often enough restricts itself to only four or five different notes, instead of dealing with the whole chromatic scale; music which discovers rhythm as an autonomous element that was almost lost in late Romanticism; music which re-discovers the one-line melody as a phenomenon in itself, and not in a Wagnerian manner as the product of harmony; music which introduces material from nature and so-called primitive music into the sacred halls of the chamber genre; music which wants to be easily playable and entertaining, instead of becoming more of a strain for the listener and increasingly more strenuous for the player." - antonin-dvorak.cz