The Surrealistic Five chamber ensemble is a piano quintet established by young musicians from the Feliks Nowowiejski Academy of Music in Bydgoszcz and the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw.
Manuel Martínez Burgos was born in Madrid in 1970. He completed degrees in Composition, Orchestral Conducting, Pedagogy and Musicology at el Real Conservatorio Superior de Música. Martinez Burgos went on to attend the Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt under the tutelage of K. Stockhausen, W. Rihm and K. Huber before pursuing coursework at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, in Paris. Additionally, he earned a PhD in Philosophy of Music History and Science, from la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Since 2001 he has served as a professor of Composition at el Real Conservatorio Superior de Madrid, where he also served a three-year term as Vice Principal.
Robert Schumann delved head first into chamber writing in the year 1842. He completed the three string quartets of Op. 41 in two months during the summer, the Piano Quintet in E-flat, Op. 44, during the next six weeks, and the Piano Quartet, Op. 47 in the autumn. The piano parts for all these works were written for his wife Clara, who was one of Europe's leading solo pianists at the time, and he dedicated the quintet to her. Clara herself performed the piano part, joined by the Gewandhaus Quartet, for the premiere public performance of the quintet, on January 8, 1843, at the Gewandhaus.
Richard Aldrich wrote in 1929’s Cobbett’s Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music, “Schumann’s chamber music of 1842 is in many ways among the most perfect of all the products of his genius; the purest and most powerful in its beauty, the strongest in its form, best balanced in its substance, and best adapted in its technical means and processes to the expression of the composer’s thought. There is little that seems tentative, experimental, or uncertain in touch. He entered, to all appearances, full-fledged and confident upon the difficult and problematic art of chamber music.”
Alixandra Porembski, English Language Annotator