Fooling around with a trout

It is axiomatic that musical jokes are never funny; this may be because great composers rarely had much fun. But great musicians sometimes do, and this is nicely illustrated in a film made about the 1969 recital given in London by Daniel Barenboim, Itzhak Perlman, Zubin Mehta, Pinchas Zuckerman and Jacqueline du Pré, at which they played Schubert's Piano Quintet in A major D.667, "The Trout".

The film covers the rehearsals and the background to the event and includes their complete performance of the quintet, you will have to buy the DVD. It costs £24.95, but for this you also get a documentary about Schubert.


All five had been friends since they began their careers and had made names for themselves by the time they had the idea of meeting in London to perform together. After that all of them became world-famous and are still with us except Jacqueline du Pré, who performed very little after 1971, when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and stopped altogether in 1973. She died in 1987, aged 42.