Cover design for the Warner Classics Grieg collection (from the Amazon.com Web page for this album)
About a month ago Warner Classics released a thirteen-CD collection entitled Grieg: Piano, Orchestral & Vocal Works, Chamber Music. While Edvard Grieg is one of the best known of the nineteenth-century composers (not to mention one of the best known of the Scandinavian composers), he tends to be associated with a relatively small number of compositions. Thus, while this anthology is far from comprehensive, it serves to acquaint the serious listener with a fair amount of unfamiliar repertoire, much of which does not deserve the neglect is has suffered.
As is usually the case with such large collections, my plan it to take a piecemeal approach. Fortunately, the title provides me with the easiest way to divide the set up into four categories. I shall use this article to examine the four CDs of solo piano performances. Whether the order of the remaining three categories will follow the ordering of the individual CDs or the title’s collection remains to be seen.
As far as the piano repertoire is concerned, I should begin by observing that, in my early days of collecting CDs, I got hooked on the BIS Records project with Norwegian pianist Eva Knardahl to record the complete piano music of Grieg. This consisted of ten CDs; but, to be fair, the last of those CDs included the Opus 16 piano concerto in A minor and the four-hand version of the Opus 35 set of Norwegian dances. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that Grieg wrote a lot of solo piano music.
However, when it comes to “lifetime achievement,” he is probably best known for the ten books he published under the title Lyric Pieces. The first of these (Opus 12) was published in 1867, when Grieg was in his twenties; and the last (Opus 71) appeared in 1901, when he was in his late fifties. (Grieg would only live to the age of 64, dying on September 4, 1907.) Curiously, my primary acquaintance with this music in concert has come from encore selections; and, to the best of my knowledge, I have never encountered a pianist that chose to play the entire contents of any of the ten books. On the other hand I am not particularly surprised, since each book is basically an assortment without any overarching internal structure.
The Warner collection begins with the complete collection of all ten books. They are all performed by the Finnish pianist Juhani Lagerspetz. I am not sure I would recommend listening to the entire set in a single sitting, and even listening to a single CD is likely to put a strain on the patience of many serious listeners. Nevertheless, any individual piece stands on its own as a gem worth examining; and Lagerspetz plays all of them with that level of attention to both technique and expressiveness.
The other major performer contributing to the recordings of solo piano music is the Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes. He is represented by one entire CD and two tracks in the CD that has the final two books from the Lyric Pieces collection. Andsnes takes on two of the more “heavy lifting” selections, the Opus 7 four-movement piano sonata in E minor and the Opus 24 in G minor, whose full title is “Ballade in the Form of Variations on a Norwegian Folk Song.” There are fourteen variations that show us Grieg at his most virtuosic, and Andsnes is more than up to snuff on both technical and expressive achievements.
The remaining pianist in the collection is the French-Cypriot Cyprien Katsaris. His primary contribution is Grieg’s own piano transcription of his Opus 40 “Holberg” suite. He also plays one of the Norwegian dances from the Opus 35 collection and Grieg’s transcription of the “Morning Mood” episode from the incidental music he composed for a production of Henrik Ibsen’s epic play Peer Gynt.
Taken as a whole, Warner’s offering provides the serious listener with more-than-adequate breadth in accounting for the music that Grieg composed for solo piano; and there is no particularly strong reason to criticize the producers for refraining to go into any further depth.
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