César Franck’s three-movement Quintet divided its earliest audiences and continues to draw a range of responses from performers. Richard Whitehouse seeks the recordings that most fully capture its essence Few works met greater misapprehension than César Franck’s Piano Quintet after its premiere, given by Camille Saint-Saëns with the Marsick Quartet at Paris’s Salle Pleyel on January 17, 1880. Franck’s three Trios concertans, among the most ambitious Op 1s in music history, had appeared in 1843.