While the Warner Classics 13-CD collection entitled Grieg: Piano, Orchestral & Vocal Works, Chamber Music came up disconcertingly short in accounting for the vocal works of Edvard Grieg with only two CDs, the two CDs for chamber music cover pretty much all that needs to be taken into account. The Wikipedia page listing Grieg’s compositions has only eleven entries, but only five of them have opus numbers. These include the three sonatas for violin and piano, Opus 8 in F major, Opus 13 in G major, and Opus 45 in C minor, the A minor cello sonata (Opus 36), and the Opus 27 string quartet in G minor. All of these are included in the Warner collection, along with an early (date uncertain) A minor intermezzo for cello and piano. Aside from a very early fugue in F minor, the only missing items are incomplete and/or lost.
As might be guessed, the two CDs are divided into an album featuring a violinist and one devoted to a cellist. The three violin sonatas are “vintage” recordings of sessions at Abbey Road by violinist Yehudi Menuhin that took place in October of 1957. His accompanist is the Norwegian pianist Robert Levin (not to be confused with the American keyboardist Robert Levin, who specializes in historically-informed performances). Those sessions never found their way into Warner’s The Menuhin Century centennial release, which may be just as well. Levin clearly knew his Grieg (past tense because he died in 1996); and I have become skeptical enough about Menuhin to trust that Levin provided “primary guidance” through these three sonatas, all of which are given perfectly satisfying accounts.
Cellist Truls Mørk (photograph by Johs Boe, taken from a past event page on the San Francisco Symphony Web site)
The cellist, on the other hand, has been only a recent discovery to serious listeners in the Bay Area. Truls Mørk made his debut as a concerto soloist this past October, performing Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 125 “Symphony-Concerto” in E minor with the San Francisco Symphony led by visiting conductor Manfred Honeck. He then returned in March as soloist when Esa-Pekka Salonen visited Berkeley with the Philharmonia Orchestra. On that occasion he played Salonen’s cello concerto.
His CD in the Warner Grieg collection makes it clear that he is at much at home in the nineteenth century as he is when playing music that is less than a century old. There is much to engage the attentive listener in the Opus 36 sonata, and it is clear that Mørk has an excellent relationship with his accompanist, the pianist Håvard Gimse. His partnership with Jean-Yves Thibaudet for the A minor intermezzo is similarly engaging.
That leaves the Opus 27 string quartet with Mørk taking the cello part. The other performers are violinists Sølve Sigerland and Atle Sponberg and violist Lars Anders Tomter. Quite honestly, I cannot say that this recording left me with any strong desire to listen to this quartet in performance. It was written between 1877 and 1878, by which time Grieg had established himself as a major composer. In a letter to a friend, he wrote that the music “strives towards breadth, soaring flight and above all resonance for the instruments for which it is written;” but I am not sure that he followed through on his rhetorical ambitions as well as he had done in other genres.
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