Elliott Carter's Quintet for Piano and Winds, composed in 1991, should not be confused with the Woodwind Quintet of almost a half century earlier (1948), in which the piano has no place. Carter wrote the Quintet for Piano and Winds with oboist Heinz Holliger in mind, and it was Holliger who both received the dedication and played the oboe part at the 1992 Köln premiere; clarinetist Elmar Schmid, bassoonist Klaus Thunemann, horn player Radovan Vlatkovic, and pianist Andras Schiff were the others on board.

The Quintet is a single-movement work built more around long, lyrical phrases than around the kind of segmented, even fractured, layers of music that we have come to know through Carter's most famous works; a striking brand of homophony even finds a way into the work. Dispersed throughout the 612 bars of the Quintet is a series of solos for the various instruments (a famous Carter tactic); and the piano, as is so often Carter's wont, frequently assumes a percussive role designed to complement the sustained tones of the winds.

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