CHAN 9985 Front.qxd 10/5/07 4:50 pm Page 1 CHAN 9985 CHANDOS CHAN 9985 BOOK.qxd 10/5/07 5:14 pm Page 2 Edvard Grieg (1843–1907) Poetic Tone-Pictures, Op. 3 11:45 1 1 Allegro ma non troppo 1:52 2 2 Allegro cantabile 2:19 3 3 Con moto 1:55 4 4 Andante con sentimento 3:17 Lebrecht Collection Lebrecht 5 5 Allegro moderato – Vivo 1:16 6 6 Allegro scherzando 0:49 Sonata, Op. 7 19:41 in E minor • in e-Moll • en mi mineur 7 I Allegro moderato – Allegro molto 4:43 8 II Andante molto – L’istesso tempo 4:54 9 III Alla Menuetto, ma poco più lento 3:26 10 IV Finale. Molto allegro – Presto 6:25 Seven fugues for piano (1861–62) 13:29 11 Fuga a 2. Allegro 1:01 in C minor • in c-Moll • en ut mineur 12 [Fuga a 2] 1:07 in C major • in C-Dur • en ut majeur 13 Fuga a 3. Andante non troppo 2:11 Edvard Grieg in D major • in D-Dur • en ré majeur 14 Fuga a 3. Allegro 1:09 in A minor • in a-Moll • en la mineur 3 CHAN 9985 BOOK.qxd 10/5/07 5:14 pm Page 4 Grieg: Sonata, Op. 7 etc. 15 Fuga a 4. Allegro non troppo 2:36 There were two principal strands in Edvard there, and he was followed by an entire in G minor • in g-Moll • en sol mineur Grieg’s creative personality: the piano and cohort of composers-to-be, among them 16 Fuga a 3 voci. Allegro energico 1:15 Norwegian nationalism. His very first Johan Svendsen, Iver Holter, Hjalmar in C major • in C-Dur • en ut majeur experiments at the keyboard, at the age of Borgstrøm, Catharinus Elling and Christian 17 Doppel-Fuge. Andante non troppo 3:52 five, pointed to the future composer: instead Sinding, to name but some of the in G minor • in g-Moll • en sol mineur of trying to pick out a tune, as you and I did, Norwegians. Grieg found the instruction at he began exploring different harmonies and, Leipzig singularly unrewarding: for someone Four Pieces, Op. 1 13:37 soon after, sat down to learn the instrument poised to break the rules, the insistence on 18 1 Allegro con leggerezza 1:48 under the expert tuition of his mother, an academic correctitude was hard to swallow. 19 2 Non allegro e molto espressivo – Un poco più vivo – excellent player with a high reputation in the He hated some of his teachers, too, although Allegro capriccioso – Tempo I 4:59 Bergen area as a soloist and chamber others he responded to with warmth and 20 3 Mazurka. Con grazia 3:25 musician. His awareness of the potential of respect. His first harmony lessons came from Norwegian folk music was stimulated by the Ernst Friedrich Richter (1808–1879), author 21 4 Allegretto con moto 3:11 maverick violinist and composer Ole Bull of a celebrated Lehrbuch der Harmonie (1810–1880), a neighbour of his parents’ (1853) and subsequent treatises on fugue and Four Album Leaves, Op. 28 14:14 and the first real nationalist in Norwegian counterpoint – and later (1868) appointed 22 1 Allegro con moto 2:05 music. It was at Bull’s insistence that the Kantor at St Thomas’ Church, the post once 23 2 Allegretto espressivo 3:51 fifteen-year-old Grieg was despatched to held by J.S. Bach. It was for Richter that 24 3 Vivace 3:06 Leipzig to continue his studies. Grieg in 1861–62 wrote the Seven fugues 25 4 Andantino serioso – Allegro giocoso 5:02 Within a short time of its foundation in for piano, preserved in a series of four TT 73:09 1843 the Conservatory in Leipzig had exercise books from his time in Leipzig, now become the destination of choice for kept in Bergen and in Oslo. He later recalled Kyoko Tabe piano ambitious music students from the Nordic that countries, where the opportunities for further I did not yet realise that what I had to learn education in music were generally lacking. was to restrain myself, to obey orders, as it says The Dane Niels W. Gade had preceded Grieg in the introduction to his Theory of Harmony, 4 5 CHAN 9985 BOOK.qxd 10/5/07 5:14 pm Page 6 not to ask, ‘Why?’ All the same, we were never parts of Grieg’s textures give the scores an Poetic Tone-Pictures are slightly simpler in two string quartets and the cello sonata). unfriendly. He only smiled indulgently at my unusually modern appearance. ‘They style than the Four Pieces, Op. 1, perhaps Glenn Gould, who proudly boasted that stupidities and with a ‘No – wrong!’ would betoken the fumbling pupil and I blush to because they were initially intended for the Grieg was ‘a cousin of my maternal great- score them out with a thick stroke of his pencil, think that they are printed and stand as my amateur fingers of his host in Copenhagen, grandfather’, described the piano sonata as which, to tell the truth, left me as much in the Opus 1’, he wrote in 1903 – but old Grieg Benjamin Feddersen; but they begin to show a secure, smoothly articulated, postgraduate dark as ever. was being far too hard on young Grieg: in the tonal, even modal, fluidity that marks exercise in which chromatic embellishments Grieg may have felt he was being kept in both sophistication of expression and Grieg’s mature style: a touch of the Dorian enliven an occasionally complacent paragraphic the dark, but these elegant fugues – technical resourcefulness, these four pieces mode in the first of them, and easy symmetry… the E-minor Sonata best conveys impersonal in style but beautifully made – would be a remarkable achievement for any movement between major and minor in the its author’s geographic distinction – i.e., reveal that a formal contrapuntal command eighteen-year-old. fifth. Elsewhere one can again hear the independence from Austro-German symphonic underlay the more experimental textures he After a set of four songs for alto voice and influence of Schumann (No. 2), Chopin tradition – by frequent, though entirely non- was soon to begin producing. And when we piano, Op. 2, Grieg’s next published work (No. 4) and Mendelssohn (No. 6). violent, resistance to the proclivities of the consider their expert assimilation of Bachian was the collection of six Poetic Tone- Acquaintance with the short-lived Rikard leading tone and appropriate amendments to fugal practice, it may not be too fanciful to Pictures, Op. 3, written in 1863, by which Nordraak (1842–1866) – Norway’s most the motivic conceits involved. wonder whether Grieg conceived them as a time he had left Leipzig and had settled in promising composer until consumption In other words, Grieg knew what he deliberate homage to that most illustrious of Copenhagen; they were published there a carried him off – reignited the Norwegian wanted and how to achieve it: in some of the all Leipzig’s composers. year later by Johan Ole Emil Horneman, nationalism that Ole Bull had urged on later essays in sonata form he can seem to be One of the staff members of the father of the composer C.F.E. Horneman, a Grieg, with results first heard in the four producing the notes to fill out the structure, Conservatory with whom Grieg got on very close friend of Grieg’s in Leipzig. Instead of Humoresker, Op. 6 (1865). Here Grieg began but in the piano sonata the material seems to well was his piano teacher, Ernst Ferdinand the rule-bound atmosphere he had known in to move away from dependence on earlier create the structure. In the first movement, Wenzel (1808–1880), a close friend of Germany, Grieg was now surrounded by a romantics, and his musical language took on Allegro moderato, his romantic debts to Schumann and Mendelssohn, and it was to group of intellectuals feeling their way an invigorating wiriness. That approach Schumann and to Gade, the dedicatee of the Wenzel that Grieg dedicated the Four Pieces, towards explicitly Nordic art forms: the continued into his only Sonata, Op. 7, for sonata, meld with his new Norwegian tone Op. 1, also written in 1861. The influence of composers there included Gade from the piano, the first work (apart from the 1864 to bring to his music a confidence and sense Schumann, Mendelssohn and Chopin is older generation, with Emil Hartmann, Symphony, which he soon withdrew) in of purpose it had not previously enjoyed; plain to hear, but Grieg’s individuality was Horneman fils, August Winding and which he attempted to grapple with sonata likewise the easy-going calm which opens the already asserting itself, particularly in the Gottfred Matthison-Hansen among his form, and the one in which the result is Andante molto slow movement, and which a second and fourth pieces, where his penchant contemporaries. It is therefore hardly structurally most convincing: the form is passing cloud of Sturm und Drang fails to for chromatic chords and Norwegian dance surprising that his music began to take on a here far less rhapsodic than in later dislodge. The dignified tread of the third rhythms pushes to the fore; the fluid inner pronounced Nordic tone. Technically, the excursions (as in the three violin sonatas, the movement, marked with an unlikely Alla 6 7 CHAN 9985 BOOK.qxd 10/5/07 5:14 pm Page 8 Menuetto [sic], suggests the self-control of illustrated in the Allegro giocoso middle someone refusing to weep at a funeral; the section of the last Album Leaf.