Chamber music

[Robert Dahm]

Musical notation is a form of code. It is used as a method of transmitting essential performance information to other people who understand what the composer intends by that code.

The thing is, a certain disposition of pitches and rhythms in Bach's day had a very different understood 'meaning' from the same disposition, say, 100 years later in France. Interpretation, then, is not quite as simple as imposing a personal reaction upon a notated document (the Gould model). First, you need to understand what the composer might have meant, and only then can you impose a personal reaction.

This is where being 'inside the idiom' helps. There are any number of stylistic issues in any music that aren't necessarily directly alluded to by the notes. Closeness to the source, as it were, helps in decoding these stylistic concerns.

[quintett op.57]

Such a rich genre.
All the advices I've read are good.
The only

I'm going to give you the first 10 coming to my mind :

Haydn                 quartets op.76
Buxtehude           trio BuxWV 263
Schnittke             Cello sonata n°1
Shostakovich        Piano quintet
Enescu                String octet
Beethoven           trio after Symphony 2
Smetana             trio and quartets
Schumann            Andante & variations op.46
Schubert             String quintet
Ravel                  quartet