As I promised about a week ago, my piecemeal approach to Warner Classics’ 13-CD collection entitled Grieg: Piano, Orchestral & Vocal Works, Chamber Music will follow the discussion of the piano selections with the orchestral section. This seems appropriate since Edvard Grieg “crossed the fence” in both directions, so to speak. Music composed for piano would be subsequently orchestrated, and piano editions were composed for pieces written for orchestra. The best example of the latter involves the Opus 23 incidental music that Grieg composed for the premiere performance of Henrik Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt.
Arthur Rackham’s illustration of Peer Gynt among the trolls from a 1936 edition of Ibsen’s play (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)
This music is best known through the two orchestral suites (particularly the first) that Grieg extracted from the 33 individual selections that Grieg composed for Ibsen. Grieg himself subsequently arranged both of those suites for solo piano, and those solo piano versions were included in the recordings of the complete piano music that Norwegian pianist Eva Knardahl made for BIS Records.
The Wikipedia page for the entire Opus 23 observes that the full score clocks in at about 90 minutes. It also notes that the score itself was not published until 1908, about a year after Grieg’s death. The publication was supervised by Johan Halvorsen.
The Warner collection allocates a single CD for the Peer Gynt music, a little over one hour in duration. It also claims to present the original version. That claim is wrong in several ways, duration being only one of them. Most important to me is that the order of the selections has been shuffled in a way that adds nothing to the listening experience. Furthermore, the two folk dances that serve as entertainment for the wedding scene in Act I should, by all rights, be played on the Hardanger fiddle, the appropriate instrument for the occasion. The Warner recording was made with Paavo Järvi conducting the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, which, apparently did not have this instrument at its disposal. So the first dance is played by violist Rain Vilu and the second by violinist Arvo Leibur. My own listening preference continues the be the two-CD Unicorn-Kanchana release with Per Dreier conducting the London Symphony Orchestra. This exceeds the 90-minute duration by inserting three of the four Opus 35 Norwegian dance arrangements into Act II, the one set in the hall of the Mountain King.
The fact is that Järvi and his Estonians are on much sounder ground when it comes to orchestral composition for its own sake. The accounts of both the Opus 35 Norwegian dances and the Opus 40 “Holberg” suite are downright refreshing, as are the four symphonic dances in the Opus 64 collection. The two Opus 34 “Elegiac” melodies are a bit on the syrupy side; but they are arrangements for string orchestra of two of the songs in the Opus 33 collection. It is a bit hard for them not to be syrupy; and the layout of the recording was kind enough to separate them with all four of the Opus 35 dances.
The other “great hit” in the collection is, of course, the Opus 16 piano concerto in A minor. Dmitri Kitayenko conducts the Bergen Philharmonic and soloist Leif Ove Andsnes. This is a perfectly satisfactory account of a concerto that all of us have heard too many times but obviously could not have been dropped from this collection! Curiously, it is coupled with an early four-movement symphony that was never assigned an opus number. (The second and third movements were arranged for four hands on one piano keyboard and became Grieg’s Opus 14 “Symphonic Pieces.”) Presumably, the symphony was included in this collection “because it’s there.”
As a lover of history, I also must note that I appreciate the presence of the late John Barbirolli conducting the Hallé Orchestra in this collection. The recording includes the Lyric Suite, consisting of orchestrations of four of the compositions in the fifth book of Lyric Pieces (Opus 54), as well as the “Homage” march from the Opus 56 set of orchestral excerpts of incidental music for Sigurd Jorsalfar, the play by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson.
I must confess that I have not previously engaged in “deep-end” listening to Grieg’s orchestral writing. In general I was impressed by what I heard, which means that I was satisfied by most of the contributing conductors. Nevertheless, my listening preferences still incline towards the solo piano music; and nothing in this collection persuaded me to shift my attention.
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