Alto saxophonist Randal Despommier offers with A Midsummer Odyssey, a captivating duo session with guitarist extraordinaire Ben Monder. The central focus is the highly accessible yet always enigmatic music of Swedish baritone saxophonist Lars Gullin (1928-1976). // It was a chance encounter with "Danny's Dream," a lithe and melodic piece played for Despommier by his friend Olof Lovmo in Italy in 2005, that sparked the altoist's deep and longstanding interest in Gullin. Despommier describes the tune as "a mix between a Norse folk-song arrangement by Edvard Grieg and a Billy Strayhorn ballad." Having triggered the process that would ultimately lead to A Midsummer Odyssey, Lovmo fittingly took on the role of assistant producer.
MIDSUMMER ODYSSEY - THE MUSIC OF LARS GULLIN
$16.63
CD
SUNNYSIDE
Jul 15, 2022
SYS1668.2
Grieg: Violin Sonatas Nos. 1-3
Bridge Records
Available as
CD
$18.99
Jan 01, 1992
Classical Music
Grieg: Violin Sonatas Nos. 1-3
$18.99
CD
Bridge Records
Jan 01, 1992
BCD9026
Kilpinen / Grieg / Sibelius: Nordic Vocal Music
BIS
Available as
CD
$21.99
Aug 01, 1995
Classical Music
Kilpinen / Grieg / Sibelius: Nordic Vocal Music
$21.99
CD
BIS
Aug 01, 1995
BIS-CD-43
PEER GYNT SUITES / PIANO CONCERTO
ALTO
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CD
$11.01
Apr 29, 2014
Classical Music
PEER GYNT SUITES / PIANO CONCERTO
$11.01
CD
ALTO
Apr 29, 2014
AOTL1218.2
Grieg, E.: Piano Concerto (Pivka, Slovak Philharmonic, Rezuc
Bella Musica
Available as
CD
$10.99
Jan 01, 1995
Classical Music
Grieg, E.: Piano Concerto (Pivka, Slovak Philharmonic, Rezuc
$10.99
CD
Bella Musica
Jan 01, 1995
BM312070
Grieg, E.: Piano Concerto / Peer Gynt Suite No. 1 / From Hol
Bella Musica
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$10.99
Jan 01, 1995
Classical Music
Grieg, E.: Piano Concerto / Peer Gynt Suite No. 1 / From Hol
$10.99
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Bella Musica
Jan 01, 1995
BM312043
Songs of Orpheus
Sono Luminus
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$17.99
Aug 22, 2025
At once sensual and existential, this collection of songs-composed across 125 years-meditates on nature and nostalgia, sex and love, the ephemerality of the human spirit, and the eternal, transformative power of art. These song cycles of Edvard Grieg, Claude Debussy, George Crumb, and Robert Spano coalesce into a testament to the limitless potency and fragility of love-both it's resplendent joys and it's tender sorrows. Despite love's transience and riskiness, the album compels us to ruminate on Rilke's witticism that "for one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks...' Each of the cycles presents us with existential questions of life and death, love and loss, but the album is structured in couplets. Debussy and Spano draw upon Ancient Greece, Grieg and Crumb draw upon enchantments of nature, the temporality of love, life, and memory. Claude Debussy's ethereal Chansons de Bilitis (1899) evokes a lusty, Grecian fever dream where the tumescence of love and desire comes to the fore. Robert Spano's Sonnets to Orpheus (2020) lends voice to Rilke's enigmatic eponymous poetry. Spano's setting of the songs-the intimate conversation between piano and soprano-"draws one voice out of two separate strings." Meanwhile, George Crumb's Three Early Songs (1947) emerge as whispered secrets, darkly-hued odes to impermanent nature-night, a flower, and wind. The songs lead us to ponder the difference between the actual and the seeming. Chansons de Bilitis is a sensual, sultry tease in more ways than one. The poetry penned by Pierre Louÿs is a literary forgery. Louÿs, in an introduction to his original poems, claimed that the verses were found in the tomb of a sixth-century (fictional) poetess named Bilitis. She was made out to be a contemporary of Sappho and the poems were written as pastiches in the style of Sapphic erotism. This deception only fueled the work's popularity. And although Debussy only sets three poems, Louÿs wrote 143 poems separated into three volumes that span scenes of pastoral youth (Book I: Bucoliques en Pamphylie), to burgeoning Lesbian-referring both to same-sex attraction and to acts associated with the isle of Lesbos-sexuality (Book II: elegies à Mytilene), and to life as a courtesan at the employ of Aphrodite (Book III: Epigrammes dans l'île de Chypre). In this way, maturation narratives-bildungsroman-form a motif throughout this album. Louÿs was inspired by sex tourism, to be blunt. At the insistence of friend and fellow writer, Andre Gide, Louÿs traveled to Algeria to indulge in sensual exoticism (and orientalism). A young Arab woman, Meriem, had come highly recommended by Gide who wrote of her and her music as something that "stupefied me like an opiate" as it "drowsily and voluptuously benumbed my thoughts." Meriem would become the muse for Chansons, which Louÿs began to draft in Algeria; the dedication of the collection reads "in memory of Meriem ben Atala." The turn of the twentieth century was rife with literary and musical games-anagrams, witticisms, forgeries, and puns. Louÿs even includes a fake scholar in the introduction to his work named G. Heim, meaning "mysterious" in German. And the title seems to me to be a play on words suggesting the feebleness, the feeblemindedness, debilite (de Bilitis) of love, sex, and the trickery of artistry. Exoticism too was par for the fin de siecle course-just think of the Orientalism of Delibes's Lakme (1883), Ravel's Sheherazade (1898/1902), and Debussy's own "Pagodas" from his piano suite, Estampes (1903). Each piece relies on coded musical identifiers that suggest otherness-nonconventional percussion instruments, incessant and layered rhythms, and sonic chinoiserie. For those sonic elements, Louÿs called upon his dear friend, Debussy, to orchestrate music to underscore his poetry. Debussy complained that the turnaround time was too short. Nevertheless, he was hard up and needed the money.
Selections recorded November 27-29, December 11, and December 13, 1989.
Grieg: Lyric Pieces / Balázs Szokolay
$19.99
CD
Naxos
Mar 24, 1991
8550450
Grieg: Piano Music, Vol. 10
Naxos
Available as
CD
$19.99
Dec 01, 1995
Grieg: Piano Music, Vol. 10
Grieg: Piano Music, Vol. 10
$19.99
CD
Naxos
Dec 01, 1995
8553396
Grieg: Piano Music, Vol. 5
Naxos
Available as
CD
$19.99
Nov 13, 1995
Grieg: Piano Music, Vol. 5
Grieg: Piano Music, Vol. 5
$19.99
CD
Naxos
Nov 13, 1995
8553391
Grieg: Piano Music, Vol. 2
Naxos
Available as
CD
$19.99
Aug 17, 1995
Grieg: Piano Music, Vol. 2
Grieg: Piano Music, Vol. 2
$19.99
CD
Naxos
Aug 17, 1995
8550882
Grieg: Complete Piano Music, Vol. 10
BIS
Available as
CD
$21.99
Jan 01, 1987
Classical Music
Grieg: Complete Piano Music, Vol. 10
$21.99
CD
BIS
Jan 01, 1987
BIS-CD-113
Grieg: Piano Music, Vol. 6
Naxos
Available as
CD
$19.99
Oct 31, 1995
Grieg: Piano Music, Vol. 6
Grieg: Piano Music, Vol. 6
$19.99
CD
Naxos
Oct 31, 1995
8553392
Grieg: Piano Music, Vol. 12
Naxos
Available as
CD
$19.99
Feb 02, 1996
Grieg: Piano Music, Vol. 12
Grieg: Piano Music, Vol. 12
$19.99
CD
Naxos
Feb 02, 1996
8553398
Furatus
2L
Available as
Blu-Ray with SACD
$44.99
Mar 03, 2017
Human creativity is versatile and endless. If we enthuse about something we feel a need to convey that enthusiasm to others - to quote, to recite. Creativity is thus closely bound up with inspiration. One of the oldest and most resilient ways of fostering cultural life is to "borrow" ideas. In music this has been normal practice as long as there have been songs and singers to sing them. In the Romantic period, this musical borrowing became an art form in its own right, with world-famous virtuosos and composers leading the way. But there are also artists today who relish this art form. Ole Edvard Antonsen and Wolfgang Plagge are two exemplary examples on this release!
Furatus
$44.99
Blu-Ray with SACD
2L
Mar 03, 2017
2L-130-SABD
Grieg: Works For Orchestra / Abravanel, Utah Symphony
Vox
Available as
CD
$29.99
Jan 01, 1991
Classical Music
Grieg: Works For Orchestra / Abravanel, Utah Symphony
Though Anne Sofie von Otter’s Gramophone Award-winning disc remains the clear choice for a single record devoted to Grieg’s songs, this new one runs it close. Bodil Arnesen is a young lyric soprano with just the right freshness for these open-air songs (as so many of them are) of spring and hope. She is entirely firm, has a healthy glow on the upper notes, shows a nice feeling for nuance, and knows how to make the voice smile. Some limitation is felt in the few darker songs, such as the second of Op. 48, “Dareinst, Gedanke mein”, which von Otter takes at a slower pace, introducing an unearthly pallor into the tone, and providing a more weighty reminder of the link back to Schubert’s Wanderers Nachtlied and forward to Strauss’s Ruhe, meine Seele. Then in the next song, “Lauf der Welt”, von Otter has a style at once bolder and more confiding: she communicates as though to a larger audience and so on a bigger scale, enlarging what one might call the vocal gestures of intimacy to match. Yet for home-listening, especially if you are playing at a good volume, I’m not sure that such large expressiveness isn’t just a little overwhelming: certainly the return, from that, to the soprano’s relatively miniaturist style is no hardship.
The choice of songs is fine, so too the programming, in which the sequence (not chronological) is sensible and satisfying. For a proper conspectus of Grieg’s songs it is necessary to have the Haugtussa cycle, which von Otter includes and Arnesen does not; there is compensation, however, in the charming Bjornson settings (Op. 21), the two songs of Solveig, and others such as The Princess and “With a primrose” which are among the best of all. Erling Eriksen accompanies sympathetically, the balance of voice and piano is well judged and the booklet provides useful and attractive companionship.
