Walk the mountains and the valleys, touch the lakes and rivers, smell the clean air and pine forest, see bleak winter wildness and spring flowers exploding, pause so you don't disturb the wildlife; watch, and be watched! Later inhale the faint smoke from distant warming fires and the food they cook. Embrace the day, and mould your thoughts and creativity. These are some of the life experiences had by Grieg, Rautavaara, Abrahamsen and Sibelius, who form the featured composers on this new recording.
The Leipzig String Quartet sets out on yet another musical journey, and a genuine discovery is in store inasmuch as Niel Wilhelm Gade’s Quartet “Willkommen und Abschied” is being heard here for the first time in complete form. Since the Dane Gade, like Edvard Grieg, whose Quartet op. 27 is also part of this tour, had important musical roots in Leipzig, the journey also covers home turf.
During the first half of the nineteenth century the string quartet was regarded as the embodiment of absolute music. It may seem to have been a rather bold move for a young composer for Gade to have used the literary source, Goethe’s poem “Willkommen und Abschied,” for his first string quartet.
Edvard Grieg studied under Gade in Copenhagen, where he developed ideas for his Nordic music like in his Quartet op. 27. The powerful introduction of the first movement already contains the famous “Grieg motif,” from which many themes derive. Grieg himself fueled speculations about its autobiographical connections by working with his “Spielmannslied”; his quartet is a top-class chamber event in this gripping interpretation by the members of the Leipzig String Quartet.
After her award-winning album "Røta", Ragnhild Hemsing dedicates herself to the Norwegian national epic "Peer Gynt" and its musicalization by Edvard Grieg. Through the collaboration with the Trondheim Soloists the world-famous melodies resound in new arrangements for violin and Hardanger fiddle with string orchestra. "Edvard Grieg himself has said that his Peer Gynt music is inspired by Norwegian folk music. With that in mind, my desire through this project has been to penetrate deeper into the sound world of the Peer Gynt music and explore the exciting intersection between folk and classical music", says the Norwegian artist. From "In the Hall of the Mountain King" to "Morning Mood", her new album has everything you need to immerse yourself in the Nordic soundscapes and mythical sagas.
REVIEW:
Ragnild Hemsing once again makes a strong case for the Hardanger fiddle and, through Tormood Tvete Vik’s clever and tasteful arrangement of Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt music, brings it very close to Norwegian folk music. The 12 individual movements are played alternately by Hardanger fiddle and the violin.
Ragnild Hemsing plays beautifully and creates indescribably atmospheric moments that have never been heard before. The Trondheim Soloists accompany the soloist with beautiful sound that exactly reflects the mood of the music. This somewhat short CD (48') is a must, and not only for those who like to explore. There are also informative booklet texts.
Grieg’s four Symphonic Dances are a late work, completed in 1898. Grieg takes his inspiration (as in so much of his output) from traditional Norwegian folk tunes, and the four movements together deliver a symphonic unity in their overall effect. Both Bergliot and Before a Southern Convent are written on texts by Grieg’s good friend the author Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, who was also a theatre manager in Oslo. Bjørnson is considered one of the four great Norwegian authors alongside Ibsen, Lie, and Kielland, received the 1903 Nobel Prize for literature, and wrote the words for the Norwegian national anthem. Bergliot – a declamation with orchestra – tells the story of a dramatic episode involving the chieftain Einar Tambarskjelve and his son Eindride, killed by King Harald Hårdråde. Before a Southern Convent is a more traditional setting – requiring two vocal soloists, female choir, and orchestra rather than the narrator of Bergliot – of the story of the folk-hero and barbarian Arnljot Gelline. In the course of his wild escapades, he killed a chieftain, but allowed the chieftain’s daughter, Ingigerd, to live. This daughter left the homestead and wandered southwards in poverty – through Europe. At long last she arrived at a convent which granted her admittance. The album is completed by the Funeral March for Rikard Nordraak – a friend of Grieg’s, who died of tuberculosis in 1866. Grieg conceived it first for solo piano, but whilst travelling by train to Bergen to attend Grieg’s funeral, Johan Halvorsen made the orchestral arrangement heard in this recording.
Her curiosity, her thirst for discovery and her audacity have led her to cultivate eclecticism, to follow paths less travelled and to take us to places where we might not have expected her to go. Deeply committed to the process of creating new music, she has also developed a passion for the minimalist movement and a notable penchant for music stripped down to extreme starkness. From her many immersions in often hypnotic sound worlds, Vanessa Wagner has emerged a different person, freer and more willing to reveal herself. And so it is that today she offers us what is probably her most personal recording, a programme she developed over two long years, constructing an imaginary, fantasised narrative based on miniatures by Grieg, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius and Glinka. The pianist becomes the author and narrator of a story of shadows and light.
Grieg: Complete Works For Piano Solo Vol 1 / Gerhard Oppitz
RCA
Available as
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$33.99
Jan 30, 2013
Includes work(s) for piano by Edvard Grieg. Soloist: Gerhard Oppitz.
Grieg: Complete Works For Piano Solo Vol 1 / Gerhard Oppitz
$33.99
CD
RCA
Jan 30, 2013
RCA61568
Grieg: Slåtter, Op. 72 & Stimmungen, Op. 73
SOMM Recordings
Available as
CD
$20.99
$15.99
Nov 01, 2015
Grieg was the first great composer in the late 1880's to travel around Norway collecting folk tunes from the rural population and these proved to be a genuine source of inspiration to him. For John McCabe, as his original note for these recordings makes clear, Grieg was a far more significant figure than popular appreciation would suggest and these recordings came as quite revelatory in the early 1980's to wider audiences outside of the inner circle of specialists in Norweigian music.
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Grieg: Slåtter, Op. 72 & Stimmungen, Op. 73
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CD
SOMM Recordings
Nov 01, 2015
SOMMCD 0154
Mozart/Grieg: Sonatas For Piano Duet / Dena Piano Duo
2L
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$18.99
Jul 24, 2007
MOZART (Arr. Grieg) Piano Sonatas: in C, K 545; in F, K 533; in G, K 283; in c, K 457 • Dena Pn Duo • 2-L 40 (Hybrid multichannel SACD: 73:10)
Why would anyone, even Edvard Grieg—not the greatest composer by a long shot, but a great musical figure and one who revered Mozart—arrange any Mozart piano sonatas—even the powerful K 457 and the forward-looking K 533—for two pianos? My wariness of arrangements other than those by the composer leads me to ask again, why? Well, if you’ve never tried it (or never heard it), don’t knock it. Keep an open mind! But before I listened, I read. The notes in the accompanying booklet describe what Grieg did. (In English, the small, red font against a purple background is an abominable choice for reading; in German, the white font against the same background is eminently readable, but my German is now a distant memory.) Grieg’s “arrangements” are actually adaptations, or more precisely, augmentations. In each sonata, Grieg retained Mozart’s score as the primo and composed a secundo to add a more contemporary style to the music. Now this is certainly a novel approach to “arranging,” and it may be the first example of crossover. It is akin to the current theatrical practice of presenting Shakespeare in contemporary guise, such as Julius Caesar in Fascist uniforms or The Taming of the Shrew on motorcycles (both courtesy of noted stage director Michael Kahn or those directors he fosters), a practice that I deplore. Then I listened. What I heard were four Mozart sonatas that were as fully recognizable as their originals, but with fuller bass lines, with extra and more complex harmonization, and with significantly non-Mozartian embellishments.
In the early K 283, much more Grieg is discernable in the latter two movements than in the first movement. K 545, Mozart’s easy-to-play and most popular sonata, can be described as complexified simplicity. The power of the first movement of K 457 is greatly weakened by Grieg’s defocusing secundo augmentation. The second movement of K 457 fares even worse, sounding like a mixture of ballroom dance-music with piano noodling by a “stylist.” Grieg’s defocusing secundo augmentation relaxes the tension in the final movement, eventually enervating the normally powerful coda. Most interesting is the first movement of K 533, which is stylistically very open to Grieg’s secundo augmentation. In the K 533 second movement, in a-b-a form, Mozart already achieves Grieg’s contemporary style in part b without Grieg’s intervention. By contemporizing part a, Grieg distracts from the listener’s amazement at the shocking progressions and harmonies that Mozart introduces in part b. But this provides the opportunity in part b for Grieg to really let loose, building interestingly on Mozart’s already impressionistic base. The final movement of K 533 shows the strongest Grieg influence on this disc, masking the movement’s Mozartian delicacy—one could call it, with successive puns, the “MoztGrieg” and the least “Griegzart.”
The Dena Piano Duo (Tina Margareta Nilssen, piano 1, and Heide Görtz, piano 2) are excellent pianists, and the sound quality is also excellent. Nilssen plays the primo (Mozart) part, and Görtz plays the secundo (Grieg) part. I recommend this CD to Grieg scholars and, strictly as a curiosity, to anyone else, but not as an addition to anyone’s Mozart collection.
FANFARE: Burton Rothleder
This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.
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Mozart/Grieg: Sonatas For Piano Duet / Dena Piano Duo
Edvard Grieg: Symphonic Works Vol. I present two of the composer’s principal collections on 180g vinyl LP: the first Peer Gynt Suite, Op. 46 and his four Symphonic Dances, Op. 64. Eivind Aadland's roots in the tradition of Norwegian folk music influence his interpretations. Grieg's connections with Germany stretched from his Leipzig studies to his numerous concert performances and extraordinary circulation of his works there. This recording, with the WDR Symphony Orchestra Köln, represents on several levels a German-Norwegian synthesis already in existence during Grieg's lifetime.
Grieg: From Holberg’s Time, Lyric Pieces & Works for Piano
Berlin Classics
Available as
CD
$13.99
Aug 30, 2013
Classical Music
Grieg: From Holberg’s Time, Lyric Pieces & Works for Piano
$13.99
CD
Berlin Classics
Aug 30, 2013
BC0300559
Grieg: Piano Sonata - 14 Lyric Pieces / Idmtal
Piano Classics
Available as
CD
$20.99
$10.49
Nov 19, 2021
Having completed his studies at the Brussels conservatoire and won first prizes at several distinguished competitions for young musicians, Matthieu Idmtal quickly became known as a specialist in the music of Alexander Scriabin. His debut on record was dedicated to a sequence of the Russian composer’s Etudes and Preludes, and it won him golden reviews. His Scriabin album was followed by an equally well-received album of the violin sonatas by Edvard Grieg, in company with his regular violin-recital partner Maya Levy. The natural sequel is this focus on the Norwegian composer’s solo output. Grieg composed seven books of Lyric Pieces across the course of his career: songs without words that amount to a diary of his compositional evolution as well as testament to enduring preoccupations such as the artistic transformation of folksong and the evocation of natural phenomena such as sunlight and the movement of water. Idmtal’s sequence ranges across all seven books, and does not shy away from established classics such as the Arietta and Wedding Day at Troldhaugen. However, he also includes several lesser-known and introspective masterpieces such as the Vanished Days and Homesickness from the Opus 57 set. Even by their side, however, the Piano Sonata Op 7 is an almost forgotten masterpiece. Grieg wrote it at the age of 22, recently graduated from the conservatoire in Leipzig, yet even within the first movement’s opening exposition there are shapes and harmonies that instantly identify the composer’s artistic fingerprint. The sonata reflects the ambitions and character of the young Grieg: high-spirited, virtuosic, impetuous, and permeated with brusque mood swings. Cast in a compressed version of the traditional four-movement form, it encompasses many changes of mood, sometimes very abrupt, as if the composer was overflowing with musical ideas and inspiration.
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Grieg: Piano Sonata - 14 Lyric Pieces / Idmtal
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Piano Classics
Nov 19, 2021
PCL10239
Grieg, E.: From Holberg's Time / Piano Sonata, Op. 7 / Peer
Ars Produktion
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SACD
$21.99
Jan 01, 2009
Import Hybrid-SACD pressing.
Grieg, E.: From Holberg's Time / Piano Sonata, Op. 7 / Peer
The newly formed Zilliacus Quartet (Cecilia Zilliacus, violin I, Julia-Maria Kretz, violin II, Ylvali Zilliacus, viola, and Kati Raitinen, cello) now release an exclusive album with rare string quartets by Edvard Grieg, Amanda Maier, and Julius Röntgen. It's the first time Julius Röntgen's original manuscript of his completed version of Grieg's F major quartet has been recorded, including Röntgen's coda of the final movement. This CD with romantic string quartets of three close friends is a must for all string quartet lovers!
Grieg: Piano Concerto / Johannesen, Abravanel, Utah Symphony
Vox
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$19.99
$14.99
Jun 28, 2024
Maurice Abravanel and the Utah Symphony Orchestra are joined by Grant Johannesen in this classic Vox recording of Grieg's Piano Concerto. The programme is completed with the overture In Autumn, the Two Lyric Pieces and the Old Norwegian Melody with Variations. Newly remastered from the original tapes.
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Grieg: Piano Concerto / Johannesen, Abravanel, Utah Symphony
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On Sale![Grieg: Symphonic Works, Vol. 1 / Aadland, WDR Sinfonieorchester Koln [Vinyl]](//arkivmusic.com/cdn/shop/files/2804742.jpg?v=1778290406&width=800)
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![Grieg: Symphonic Works, Vol. 1 / Aadland, WDR Sinfonieorchester Koln [Vinyl]](http://arkivmusic.com/cdn/shop/files/2804742.jpg?v=1778290406&width=800)
