Peer Gynt (Complete Incidental Music) Soloists • Malmö Chamber Choir Malmö Symphony Orchestra • Bjarte Engeset

Home , Gjermund Larsen, In Autumn, Johanne Dybwad, Laura Gundersen, Morning Mood, Odd Nordstoga

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Vaarnatt og seljekall by Nicolai Astrup (1880-1928) GRIEG 2 CDs (©Sparebankstiftelsen DnB NOR, Norway); Photograph: Erik Fuglseth, Norway Peer Gynt (Complete Incidental Music) Soloists • Malmö Chamber Choir Malmö Symphony Orchestra • Bjarte Engeset

Peer Gynt Also available: Peer Gynt ...... Hans Jakob Sand Åse (Aase), his mother ...... Anne Marit Jacobsen Solveig ...... Isa Katharina Gericke Fiddler (Hardanger fiddle) ...... Gjermund Larsen Dairymaid (Herdgirl); Witch ...... Unni Løvlid Dairymaid (Herdgirl); Witch ...... Kirsten Bråten Berg Dairymaid (Herdgirl) ...... Lena Willemark The Mountain King (Dovre-King); Senior Troll (Courtier); The Bøyg (Voice in the Darkness); Button-moulder ...... Erik Hivju Anitra ...... Itziar M. Galdos Thief ...... Knut Stiklestad Fence; sings ‘Peer Gynt’s Serenade’ ...... Yngve A. Søberg Malmö Chamber Choir (Chorus Master: Dan-Oluf Stenlund) Boys’ and Girls’ Choruses of the Lund Cultural School (Chorus Master: Karin Fagius) Malmö Symphony Orchestra Bjarte Engeset

Before a Southern Convent (Foran Sydens Kloster) 8.570236 Isa Katharina Gericke, Soprano Marianne E. Andersen, Alto Malmö Chamber Choir (women’s voices) (Chorus Master: Dan-Oluf Stenlund) Malmö Symphony Orchestra Bjarte Engeset

Bergliot Bergliot ...... Frøydis Armand

Malmö Symphony Orchestra 8.557991 Bjarte Engeset

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Lund School of Culture Choruses CD 1 75:58 Act IV

The Lund School of Culture in Sweden has extensive choral activities for young people aged nine to nineteen, and is Peer Gynt, Op. 23 ^ Morning Mood (Morgenstemning) 4:14 the base of the lower secondary school choirs Köramellerna and Boys’ Voice. This is not the first collaboration with (Text: Henrik Ibsen) & The Thief and the Fence (Tyven og heleren) 1:25 the Malmö Symphony Orchestra and Lund School of Culture; for many years the lower secondary choirs have taken * Arabian Dance (Arabisk dans) 4:47 part in the Nalle Christmas concerts. They have also performed at Malmö Opera and Music Theatre in productions Act I ( Anitra’s Dance (Anitras dans) 3:28 such as Macbeth, Othello and Dead Man Walking. Köramellerna and Boys’ Voice are conducted by Karin Fagius. ) Peer Gynt (spoken) 0:18 1 Prelude – At the Farm Wedding ¡ Peer Gynt’s Serenade (Peer Gynts serenade) 2:47 Malmö Chamber Choir (I bryllupsgården) (Forspill til Akt I) 5:12 ™ Peer Gynt and Anitra (Peer Gynt og Anitra) 3:16 2 The “Buck-ride” (“Bukkerittet”) £ Solveig’s Song (Solveigs sang) 5:11 The first concert of the Malmö Chamber Choir took place in November 1975 and Photo: Andreas Nilsson (spoken dialogue) 4:05 ¢ Peer Gynt at the Statue of Memnon was widely acclaimed in southern Sweden. Since then the choir has given about (Peer Gynt ved Memnonstøtten) 2:05 seven hundred concerts and made recordings for record companies, television and 3 Halling 1:14 radio. Most of the concerts have been given in Skåne, some thirty in Norrland and 4 Springar 2:16 more than a hundred in other parts of Sweden. In all, some hundred concerts have been given during tours in Denmark, Norway, Finland, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Act II CD 2 52:06 Switzerland, Hungary, Belgium, Holland, England, Israel and the United States. There have also been a number of first performances of works specially written for 5 The Bridenapping. Ingrid’s Lament Act V Dan-Olof Stenlund and his ensemble. Over the years many choir members have been recruited from the Malmö (Bruderovet. Ingrids klage) 4:18 Academy of Music and from the Copenhagen Royal Academy of Music. After a few years in the choir several of 6 Peer Gynt (spoken) 0:36 1 Peer Gynt’s Homecoming (Peer Gynts hjemfart. them have then pursued their own careers, winning great success as soloists, conductors and church musicians. 7 Peer Gynt and the Dairymaids Stormfull aften på havet) 2:39 (Peer Gynt og seterjentene) 3:44 2 The Shipwreck (Skipsforliset) 1:27 Malmö Symphony Orchestra 8 Peer Gynt and the Woman in Green 3 Solveig sings in the Hut (Peer Gynt og Den grønnkledte) 2:23 (Solveig synger i hytten) 1:43 Founded in 1925, the Malmö Symphony Orchestra is a young and vigorous orchestra. For 9 Great men ride in style! (Peer Gynt: 4 Peer Gynt (spoken) 0:26 many years dividing its energies between opera and concerts, since 1991 the orchestra “På ridestellet skal storfolk kjendes!”) 0:19 5 Night Scene (Nattscene) 7:43 has been fully committed to symphonic repertoire, which it performs in its own concert 0 6 Peer Gynt (spoken) 1:51 hall. With a complement of a hundred musicians, the orchestra offers an exciting variety In the Hall of the Mountain King 7 Whitsun Hymn: “O Blessed Morning” of concert programmes to large and enthusiastic audiences. The main focus is on the rich (I Dovregubbens hall) 2:51 (Pinsesalme: “Velsignede morgen”) 1:26 tradition of orchestral music, with the ambition of bringing it into the future. Several ! Dance of the Mountain King’s Daughter recordings have been acclaimed internationally and rewarded with the Cannes Classical (Dans av Dovregubbens datter) 1:44 8 Peer Gynt and Solveig (spoken) 0:50 Photo: Klas Andersson Award and Diapason d’Or, with a recording of the Berwald symphonies with Sixten @ Peer Gynt chased by the Trolls 9 Solveig’s Lullaby (Solveigs vuggevise) 5:51 Ehrling receiving a Gramophone Award. The collaboration of the Malmö Symphony Orchestra with Naxos and BIS (Peer Gynt jages av troll) 3:28 has done much to enhance its international reputation. Among the orchestra’s principal conductors over the years # Peer Gynt and the Bøyg 0 may be mentioned Herbert Blomstedt, Vernon Handley, James DePreist and Paavo Järvi. Vassily Sinaisky was (Peer Gynt og Bøygen) 4:33 Before a Southern Convent appointed principal conductor in 2007. (Foran Sydens Kloster), Op. 20 9:26 (Text: Björnstjerne Björnson) Act III

$ Prelude. Åse’s Death (Forspill. Åses død) 3:56 ! Bergliot, Op. 42 18:45 % Åse’s Death (Åses død) 7:47 (Text: Björnstjerne Björnson)

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Edvard Grieg (1843-1907) Erik Hivju Peer Gynt, Op. 23 • Foran Sydens Kloster, Op. 20 • Bergliot, Op. 42 Norwegian actor Erik Hivju has performed over seventy rôles at the National Theatre in Oslo Peer Gynt: Synopsis between 1968 and 2007. In recent years he has played Dagfinn the Peasant in the Nordic co- production The Pretenders (2005) and the Old Man in Sleep (2005). Erik Hivju has also been a Act I guest actor on a host of Norwegian stages, appearing for instance as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman at Rogaland Theatre, Hjalmar Ekdal in The Wild Duck, Creon in Antigone, both at Young Peer Gynt has grown up in poverty in a Norwegian inland village. In the opening scene he tells his mother a Agder Theatre, and as the judge in Crime and Punishment at Riksteatret. In 2006 he played the fantastic tale about his dramatic encounter with a buck reindeer when out hunting in the mountains (Prelude CD 1, Dovre-Master (Old Man of the Mountains) in Bentein Baardson’s production of Peer Gynt at the Track 1 and The “Buck-ride” CD 1, Track 2). Their heated dialogue ends with Peer heaving his mother up on to the pyramids in Giza, Egypt, and in autumn 2007 appeared in Erasmus Montanus, directed by roof of the mill-house and rushing off to the wedding at Hægstad (‘Halling’ CD 1, Track 3). There he has his crucial Gábor Zsámbéki. He has also appeared in several film and television productions, including Gåten Knut Hamsun first meeting with a young woman called Solveig (‘Springar’ CD 1, Track 4). Her parents warn her to keep away (1996), Salige er de som tørster/Blessed Are Those Who Thirst (1997), Island of Darkness (1997) and Svarte from Peer, who is already at loggerheads with several of the wedding guests. The act ends with Peer slinging the penger, hvite løgner (2004). He won the ‘Amanda award’ for his contribution to Fjernsynteatret’s production of bride Ingrid over his shoulder and carrying her off into the mountains (The Bridenapping. Ingrid’s Lament CD 1, Molière’s Tartuffe. Track 5). Marianne E. Andersen Act II Born in Oslo, Marianne E. Andersen trained at London’s Royal Academy of Music where she Peer is soon bored with Ingrid; Solveig has touched him much more deeply. The country people try to hunt him graduated with the highest honours, and at the National Opera Studio. Further studies with down, and he revels in the thrill of the chase (CD 1, Track 6). On the run in the mountains, he meets three sexually teachers including Vera Rozsa in London and Ileana Cotrubas in France, have helped her gather provocative cow-girls (Peer Gynt and the Dairymaids CD 1, Track 7), and then a still more seductive creature (Peer prizes and awards of national and international status and to become a finalist in the Belvedere Gynt and the Woman in Green CD 1, Track 8). Peer and the woman in green arrive in the realm of the trolls on the International Singing Competition in Vienna. After her successful concert début in Oslo, back of an enormous pig (Great men ride in style! CD 1, Track 9). The trolls give the intruder an increasingly widespread critical acclaim established her reputation as a favourite artist in her native country. unfriendly welcome, and the Mountain King finally has to call a halt to their threats (In the Hall of the Mountain Marianne Andersen has performed in recitals in London, in Lyon, and in Vilnius, and has also King CD 1, Track 10). The woman in green turns out to be the daughter of the Mountain King himself, and she now appeared on many occasions at Grieg’s former home in Troldhaugen, at the University Hall in dances for Peer (Dance of the Mountain King’s Daughter CD 1, Track 11). Peer seems tempted to settle down in the Oslo, at Lillehammer, and at the Rosendal Barony in Hardanger. She has collaborated with leading conductors and Kingdom of the trolls, until he hears the Mountain King’s proposal to make him a real troll – via a few small won international distinction in both the opera house and concert hall, with festival appearances in Edinburgh, adjustments to his eyes... He tries to escape, but the troll children angrily swarm around him (Peer Gynt chased by Jerusalem and Bergen and at the Thuringian Bach-Wochen in Germany and the Glogerfestspillene in Kongsberg. the Trolls CD 1, Track 12). He is saved only by the first rays of sunlight and the ringing of distant church bells. Yelling in terror, the trolls scatter; the palace collapses and Peer Gynt is left alone in the dark. We hear him thrashing about him with a big tree-branch as he encounters the invisible and baffling “Bøyg” (Peer Gynt and the Bøyg CD 1, Track 13).

Act III

Peer is now an outlaw and outcast. He has built himself a hut in the forest, and Solveig, making a courageous sacrifice, leaves her family to live with him there. But Peer soon has another visitor: the Mountain King’s daughter, who claims that the ugly child at her side is Peer’s. Confused, Peer abandons Solveig and sets off to travel in distant lands. Grieg’s only contribution to this act was music for Peer’s last meeting with his mother Åse, which is also used as the act prelude (Åse’s Death CD 1, Track 14 and 15). In the death scene there are close parallels with Peer’s buckride-fantasy as he imagines himself bringing Åse in a horse-drawn sleigh to St Peter.

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Kirsten Bråten Berg Act IV

Owing to her immense interest in and knowledge of Norwegian folk-music, singer Kirsten Bråten The prelude to Act IV (Morning Mood CD 1, Track 16) introduces several scenes set in North Africa. Time has Berg from Setesdal in Norway is one of the key figures in Norwegian vocal music tradition. She is passed: Peer is middle-aged and well-off, though no less selfish and self-seeking. His yacht has mysteriously burst renowned for her Norwegian ‘kveding’ (unaccompanied singing) and for her love of placing old into flames and sunk, and he is stranded on the Moroccan coast. Two criminals are hiding nearby, trying to evade music traditions in new contexts, for example through her collaboration with jazz musician Arild the soldiers of the emperor they’ve just robbed (The Thief and the Fence CD 1, Track 17). They flee without their Andersen. Kirsten Bråten Berg has participated in many festivals and has also won a host of awards booty, and Peer stumbles across it: a white horse and royal clothes in the middle of the desert! Not one to look a gift and distinctions. She has won the Spellemannsprisen award several times and received the top horse in the mouth, he is soon hailed as a prophet and king, and does not find it necessary to explain that he is medal in the Landskappleiken as far back as 1987. In the mid-1990s she teamed up with two West actually wearing the emperor’s clothes. Peer is entertained by Anitra, the daughter of the local Arab chieftain, and African musicians to produce the album From Senegal to Setesdal. The music is unmistakably her attendants (Arabian Dance CD 1, Track 18 and Anitra’s Dance CD 1, Track 19). Spouting half-remembered Norwegian, yet the African tones blend in well and bear witness to the boundary-breaking forces of folk-music. literary phrases, he tries to seduce Anitra (CD 1, Track 20, Peer Gynt’s Serenade CD 1, Track 21, and Peer Gynt Over the years she has toured frequently and in addition to her many concerts in her home country she has also and Anitra CD 1, Track 22). But she outwits him, helping herself to his money and galloping off on the horse, performed in New York and London, as well as in Mozambique, South Africa, Brazil, Italy and Germany. leaving poor Peer stranded in the desert. At this moment the scene changes to a sunlit Nordic landscape, where Solveig, also by now middle-aged but sustained by her deep and faithful love, sits spinning (Solveig’s Song CD 1, Yngve André Søberg Track 23). Meanwhile, back in Africa, Peer has made it to Egypt, where he encounters the Sphinx and the Statue of Memnon (Peer Gynt at the Statue of Memnon CD 1, Track 24). The act ends in satire, with Peer being crowned Bass baritone Yngve André Søberg trained at the Norwegian Academy of Music and has recently ‘Emperor of the Self’ in a surrealistic ‘lunatic asylum’. graduated from the Royal Danish Opera Academy in Copenhagen. In 2003 he made his début as Quince in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Copenhagen Opera. A year later he sang in Act V Puccini’s Turandot and in Mozart’s Don Giovanni on the same stage. He made his début at The Norwegian Opera in the rôle of the sacristan in Puccini’s Tosca. In 2006 he was a soloist in two Heading homeward, Peer is caught in a devastating storm at sea, depicted by Grieg in two programmatic concerts at The Norwegian Opera. Since his début Yngve André Søberg has won a host of awards, instrumental pieces (Peer Gynt’s Homecoming CD 2, Track 1 and The Shipwreck CD 2, Track 2). Peer survives by including first prize and the audience award in the Malmö Vocal Competition 2006. In autumn hanging on to the ship’s capsized dinghy and beating back the cook and another passenger who try to join him. Back 2007 he returned to Malmö, not only for the concert with MSO but also to take part in Puccini’s La in his native Norway, Peer begins the slow and painful process of self-discovery. One of the ways Ibsen shows this fanciulla del west at Malmö Opera and Music Theatre. is the famous ‘onion monologue’, where Peer peels off layer after layer but never finds the kernel. Solveig’s singing, too, contributes to his enlightenment (Solveig sings in the Hut CD 2, Track 3 and Track 4). Peer passes into Knut Stiklestad a symbolic world, where the fire-damaged and fog-ridden forest landscape seems to embody his spiritual devastation (Night Scene CD 2, Tracks 5 and 6). Solveig, taking on an increasingly religious dimension, becomes Knut Stiklestad has performed rôles for The Norwegian Opera and many opera houses around the mirror in which the narcissistic Peer can finally see himself clearly (Whitsun Hymn CD 2, Track 7 and 8). The Norway, including Trondheim, Kristiansund, Bergen, Kristiansand, Bodø and Opera Mobile. He Button-moulder wants to melt Peer down and remake him into another man, but in the final scene he still gives Peer has worked in opera for conductors Terje Boye Hansen, Neil Dodd, Kjell Seim, Ole Kristian Ruud time to be cradled by the forgiving Solveig, like a son in his mother’s arms (Solveig’s Lullaby CD 2, Track 9). and Stefan Sköld, and with directors including Bentein Baardson, Ronald Rørvik, Wilhelm Sandven and Stein Winge. Knut Stiklestad has toured with the concert piece based on Knut Hamsun’s collection of poems entitled Den vilda kören, set to music and accompanied by Bjørn Willadsen. He can also be heard on CD with songs by Paul Okkenhaug and religious folk-songs from Trøndelag. There have also been several romance programmes for radio and TV. In addition he has taken part in music festivals such as the St Olav Festival in Trondheim, Nordland Music Festival, the Winter Chamber Music Festival in Bergstaden, the Northern Light Festival and Norsk Musikkfestival.

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Peer Gynt, Op. 23 Gjermund Larsen

Orpheus struck with his pure tones Gjermund Larsen from Verdal, Norway, is one of his country’s leading young folk musicians. As a Souls into beasts, and fire from stones. member of the folk group Majorstuen he won the Spellemannsprisen award in 2003 and was Our Norway has a fair few rocks. nominated again three years later. In 2005 he won the Royal Trophy in the Landskappleiken (the And beasts here swarm about in flocks. Norwegian violin championships), and has since won a host of other awards for his musical So play! And make rocks burn like coals! performances. He collaborates with, among others, singer and composer Odd Nordstoga, singer Play! Pierce the beasts with human souls! (Henrik Ibsen to Edvard Grieg, 1865) Sissel Kyrkjebø, and composer and musician Christian Wallumrød. As a composer he made his début with the commissioned work Brytningstid for the 2006 Telemark Festival. Gjermund Larsen The text and music that meet in Peer Gynt have the deepest seriousness, the keenest irony and the freest flight of is studying folk-music at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo. imagination – as when Peer and the buck reindeer shoot down through the air towards their reflection in the mountain lake: ‘Buck from the sky, buck from the earth, smash right into each other’. Performances of Peer Gynt Unni Løvlid can be dynamic collaborations between performers from hugely different backgrounds: actors, singers, children, folk musicians, classical musicians. The work is so all-embracing and makes such extreme demands that everyone The Norwegian Unni Løvlid from Hornindal is one of her country’s most versatile singers. can see themselves in the lost Peer. But the subject-matter can also uplift those taking part and inspire them to find Unafraid to try something new and with an interest in the combinaton of the traditional and the common resources and new insights. innovative, in 2006 she was voted folk musician of the year in Norway. She trained at the Peer Gynt was a child of its time, but also radical and innovatory – it feels bang up to date. Few other works in Norwegian Academy of Music, since when she has been busy with several recordings, countless the history of theatre music embody such an explosive encounter between many different genres. This is no concerts and teaching. Together with her educational music training, she has drawn a great deal of narrowly Norwegian tourist brochure. It speaks of the gravity of life, and of flight from the gravity of life, its duties inspiration and knowledge from her mother Oline Løvlid and the area where she grew up around and worries; it speaks of smiling through sorrow; it speaks of fantasy both as a vital force and as a lie. The literary Hornindal. She was born directly into the Norwegian music tradition and her deep roots here make historian Edvard Beyer (1920–2003) found in Peer Gynt both ‘fairytale and picture of folk-life; tragedy and her extremely successful and credible as an innovator. She has also taught at Ole Bull Akademiet fantastical, satirical, Aristophanic comedy; dream play and morality’. and the Norwegian Academy of Music. She not only performs as a soloist but is also involved in The starting-point for this CD is Grieg’s music for Peer Gynt. But Grieg himself said: ‘If you could attend a several folk-music collaborations. She is a member of the groups Fjøgl and Rusk, and has recorded two albums with production of the play, you would see that my musical intentions become clear only in the context of the stage.’ We the latter. She has released a handful of recordings under her own name including So ro liten tull (1999) through her have therefore made a selection from the text – a process that has obvious limitations, since it inevitably lays stress own company Løvlyd, and Vita (2005, Heilo), which was recorded in the Emanuel Vigeland mausoleum in Oslo. on particular aspects. Even so, we hope that some of the dynamic between text and music will come through. The text is a fount of musical ideas: crescendos and diminuendos, pauses and accents, rich tone colours etc. These Lena Willemark inspire a ‘musical’ approach even in the performance of the spoken words. The way the actors play on undercurrents in the text gives important cues to the orchestra. It was also vital to me to involve several folk musicians in this With her feet firmly rooted in the acting and singing tradition of Älvdalen, Lena Willemark has project. Folk musicians rarely have the chance to work with the sheer power and subtle nuances of a large long been winning over folk-music audiences both in Sweden and internationally. She is a symphony orchestra. They bring an aesthetic that Grieg was deeply engaged with, and they too influence the trendsetter and a source of inspiration for the new generation of Swedish folk-singers, and a veteran orchestra with their special sense of sound, pulse, rhythm and phrasing. in the world of folk-music. She is also a well-known player of the Härjedal flute, a national folk- I am particularly fascinated by the huge range of tone-colours in Grieg’s music. For the scenes in the realm of musician and a composer. At the same time she appears with some of Sweden’s most successful the trolls, for example, Grieg often asks for strong accents on muted horns and ice-cold ponticello sounds from the folk-music groups such as Frifot with Per Gudmundson and Ale Möller, and ethno jazz group strings (played with the bow close to the bridge). Such ‘screaming’, clashing colours are also found in the voice Enteli with Jonas Knutsson, Bengt Berger and others. There have been many recordings over the parts, both spoken and sung: ‘Who are you shouting to?’ ‘To the trolls!’ Grieg has a wealth of other techniques in Photo: J. Mînsson years, both as a solo artist and with her own band, as well as in other collaborations. Her first disc his palette for softer and more poetic effects: in the music for the scenes in North Africa, for instance, all kinds of was entitled När som gräset det vajar (1989, Amigo) which has become a true classic. For her latest recording, exotic sounds glitter like gemstones. Älvdalens Elektriska (2006, Digi), she returns to her passion, songs from Älvdalen. The orchestral score gives plenty of hints for the imaginative use of sound in performance. Another vital document is a 28-page letter Grieg wrote to Johan Hennum (1836–94), the musical director of the Christiania (Oslo) Theatre, who conducted the première in 1876. Since Grieg himself was not at the rehearsals, he wrote comprehensive instructions for Hennum, going beyond what was in the score. Not least, he asked for great courage in characterisation. 8.570871-72 615 8.570871-72 570871-72 bk Grieg 8/15/08 2:26 PM Page 14

Isa Katharina Gericke Grieg also used space in many creative ways in Peer Gynt, and we have tried to maintain this in our recording by placing the chorus, the actors and the folk musicians in several different places at different times, onstage and Isa Katharina Gericke was born in Berlin and grew up in Norway. After studies with Ingrid behind the scenes, just as Grieg noted in the score. This complicates things, but is crucial to bring out the Bjoner and Svein Bjørkøy at the Norwegian Music Academy in Oslo and Ingrid Figur at the multidimensional nature of the work. Hochschule der Künste in Berlin she won first prize in the national section of the Queen Sonja Ibsen wrote his dramatic poem Peer Gynt in 1867, and seven years later (1874) he asked Grieg to compose International Music Competition 2001 in Oslo. The following year she received the Luitpold music for it. Ibsen immediately went into detail about how he imagined the piece as a whole. Grieg made a start, but Prize at the Kissinger Sommer, and the same year she was selected as a performer within the found himself struggling with what he felt was ‘a terrifyingly intractable subject […] The text is such that you really Norwegian Concert Institute’s launching scheme ‘INTRO-classic’ for 2002-2004. She is a have to kill all thoughts of writing true music, and concentrate merely on the external effect’. Grieg was alive to the driving force behind the newly established Oslo Baroque Opera. Her creativity also finds an risk of producing more ‘special effects’ than ‘great art’, and – as usual – he was doubtful about achieving high Photo: Paul Bernhard outlet in her work as Artistic Director of the annual chamber music festival Glogerfestspillene quality in something ‘made to order’. In my opinion, the text forced Grieg to produce sounds, and indeed a whole in January, together with the pianist Sveinung Bjelland, finding inspiration in the festival’s central venue, the aesthetic, that point far forward in time towards what would later be called impressionism, primitivism and splendid Kongsberg Church. A singer of considerable versatility, she has made her mark as a Lieder singer, having modernism. worked with Rudolf Jansen, Brigitte Fassbaender and Håkan Hagegård. In the mid-twentieth century many critical voices were raised against Grieg’s Peer Gynt music. Hans Heiberg and John Horton, among others, claimed the music is ‘sugary’ and that it turns Ibsen’s bitter, timeless work into an Anne Marit Jacobsen ‘idyllic festival play’, stuck fast in the nineteenth century. Some of these critics based their opinions only on the orchestral suites, with no understanding of Grieg’s intentions in the theatre music as a whole. Performances had Anne Marit Jacobsen trained at the Norwegian National Academy of Theatre in Oslo, and has certainly given the impression of a folkloristic ‘costume drama’: the ‘Norwegian national play’. Ibsen himself had been with the National Theatre in the Norwegian capital for almost forty years. Her long career made cuts in the last part of the text, partly for reasons of length, and this shifted the stress at the end away from has brought her much praise and acclaim, and in 2006 she received outstanding reviews for her philosophic symbolism. Attitudes towards incidental music in general had also changed. The traditional long interpretation of Mrs Alving in Ibsen’s Ghosts, which was talked about far beyond the borders of musical ‘numbers’ were now on their way out, being replaced by background music. New production techniques Norway. Anne Marit Jacobsen is not only a highly respected actress on the national stage in meant there was less need for scene-change music designed to cover onstage noise and stop the audience becoming Norway, she is also readily recognised from television, variety, musicals, radio and film. A great bored. The definitive revolt against tradition was the 1948 version of Peer Gynt in Nynorsk1 by the director Hans entertainer and a skilled impersonator, she is remembered not least for her rôle as Gro Harlem Jacob Nilsen (1897–1957), with new music by Harald Saeverud (1897–1992). (Three movements from his Peer Brundtland. Over the years she has appeared in more than twenty films, a dozen or so television Gynt music are recorded on Naxos 8.557018.) series and, of course, in many plays, including The Cherry Orchard, Peer Gynt, The Nightingale, Today, Grieg’s music can of course limit a director’s experimental approach to the piece, and it is perfectly Don Juan and Masquerade. She also impressed in the acclaimed production of Shirley Valentine, natural that the text should sometimes be performed without Grieg. But only a one-dimensional view could dismiss a monologue she has performed to an audience of more than 100,000 on just over three hundred occasions. Peer Gynt as the lyrical Grieg hobbling the realist Ibsen. Peer Gynt starts out as a humorous, folklike tale about Peer, an imaginative lad who had a difficult childhood in Itziar Martinez Galdos an inland Norwegian village. The prelude to Act 1, ‘At the Farm Wedding’, introduces us to the young, strong and seemingly healthy Peer. In the following dialogue, ‘The “Buck-ride”’, he spins an incredible yarn about a ride on a The soprano Itziar Martinez Galdos comes from the Basque town of San Sebastián on Spain’s buck reindeer, full of wit, fantasy and childlike joie de vivre. Peer and his mother Åse are two of a kind: they both Atlantic Coast, but has been on the permanent staff at The Norwegian Opera in Oslo since 1989. She love adventure. But fantasy can also be an escape, or a lie. In Peer’s artistic temperament there is a mixture of has portrayed many of opera’s great female rôles and is now considered one of the leading Nordic egotism and megalomania. Peer leaves his mother on the mill-house roof and hares off to the wedding at Hægstad. soloists. She left her homeland to study music in Stuttgart, complementing her training at the Oslo And amid the dancing energy of the folk music, he meets Solveig for the first time. The dance melodies here are National Academy of Opera. Having spent so much time in the north, she is now better known Grieg’s own, but they use two important forms from the tradition of Norwegian fiddle music: a rather masculine abroad. Her career spans rôles such as Rosina in The Barber of Seville, Pamina in The Magic Flute, halling with two beats to the bar, and a more feminine springar in three-time. Michaela in Carmen, Desdemona in Verdi’s Otello, Orthilde in Wagner’s Die Walküre, and Floria Peer sets half of the wedding party at his throat, and then runs off into the mountains with the bride Ingrid. He Tosca in Puccini’s Tosca. She is also involved with the opera in Tbilisi, Georgia. soon becomes bored with her and wants to dump her: ‘The Devil take all women – except one…!’ (meaning Solveig). The music for ‘The Bridenapping. Ingrid’s Lament’ brings back the halling-like theme from the prelude, but faster and distorted, with diminished chords. The following descending octave motif on trumpets and muted horns will return in the next section of music, ‘Peer Gynt and the Dairymaids’, set to the repeated line: ‘Efter trold!’ – ‘To the trolls!’ The muted horn chords literally mutate the G major of the two dances into G minor. The climaxes later on, also in G minor, are reminiscent of other Grieg works in the same key, such as Den Bergtekne (The 8.570871-72 14 7 8.570871-72 570871-72 bk Grieg 8/15/08 2:26 PM Page 8

Mountain Thrall – Naxos 8.570236), his only completed String Quartet (Naxos 8.550879) and the Op. 24 Ballade Bjarte Engeset (Naxos 8.550883; orchestration by Geirr Tveitt: Naxos 8.557854). Ingrid’s lament unfolds over a painful, pedalpoint D in the viola register, from the depths of her soul. Peer, too, is desperate, in his own way. But in the hunt When Norwegian conductor Bjarte Engeset graduated in conducting from the Sibelius that ensues, we see that Peer loves being harried by the country people. ‘This is life!’ he bellows, over and over Academy in 1989, he did so with flair. With the highest possible score from the panel of again. jurors, he was acclaimed as one of the Academy’s best students of all time. Several years Now Peer enters the realm of the trolls, and the orchestral opening to ‘Peer Gynt and the Dairymaids’ is typical: later he was invited to the eminent Conductor’s Seminar at the Tanglewood Music Center, loud, icy sounds on horn and strings. Grieg’s music gives the dairymaids almost the character of being dangerous Boston University, renowned as one of the world’s leading centres for higher education in huldre2 or witches, though Ibsen portrays them rather as sexually provocative human girls – ‘If there aren’t any music. Bjarte Engeset can boast many successes. His début with the Royal Philharmonic boys, a troll will do!’ In his letter to Hennum, Grieg said: ‘This is a risky piece, that will either make a really bad Orchestra in London in 1997 was very well received, and his recordings of Norwegian impression or be a complete hit – wild, devilish and sensual – all depending on how the performers sing and play. I orchestral music by Grieg and Tveitt have also been widely acclaimed. He has been chief think this is one of the places where the music ceases to be true music.’ […] ‘They must bring out the text clearly, conductor and artistic director for the Tromsø Symphony Orchestra, and artistic director and must not stand still for an instant, but must circle around Peer Gynt, wild with desire, just a little at first, then for the Northern Light Festival and Opera Nord. He has directed orchestras in most more and more.’ Grieg asked for a ‘savage and coarse’ sound, ‘really witchlike’, ‘absolutely diabolic’. ‘There will European countries, conducted opera and made guest appearances at orchestra houses in be problems with the singing, of course, because female singers reckon it’s beneath their professional dignity to sing Mexico, the United States and Japan. He has also been guest conductor for the Flemish this kind of thing, as it never wins them any laurels, and actresses may not have good enough singing voices. But get Radio Orchestra. In 2006 he was guest conductor of the Moscow Radio Orchestra at the some life into it! That’s the main thing.’ In the mellifluous and pretty ‘Peer Gynt and the Woman in Green’ the Photo: Ulf Palm prestigious Wörthersee Classics Festival in Klagenfurt, Austria. Since 2007 Bjarte Engeset dangerous supernatural forces are still there, but hidden under the surface nature-idyll. We hear Peer’s frisky leaps has been artistic director of DalaSinfoniettan symphony orchestra in Sweden. As the regional orchestra of Dalarna in the cellos and basses, while the more piercing oboe sounds after the soft flutes begin to reveal the troll behind the county it is a common sight around the region, giving concerts at Dalhalla and at the Music at Lake Siljan festival mask: the beautiful woman in green is in fact the daughter of the Mountain King – the ruler of the trolls. The oboe each summer. sonority will develop into an even more intense form later: in the pause towards the end of the ‘Dance of the Mountain King’s Daughter’, where she strikes an ‘obscene’ pose. The stage directions to the short ‘Great men ride Hans Jakob Sand in style!’ read: ‘A gigantic pig comes running in with a stump of rope for a bridle and an old sack for a saddle. Peer Gynt vaults on to its back, clutches the woman in green in front of him, whips the pig and gallops off.’ Grieg asks The Norwegian actor Hans Jakob Sand, from Oslo, has an impressive résumé of rôles from for a completely wild tempo, and in the context of our recording this mini-movement acts as a kind of upbeat to the several Norwegian stages. He has been linked with Norway’s National Theatre, Teatret well-known ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’. Here the chorus and troll children join in, threatening Peer more and Vårt, Oslo Nye Teater, Trøndelag Theatre, Riksteatret, Rogaland Theatre and Det Norske more ecstatically until the Mountain King finally has to stop them. Witches who want to roast Peer on the spit or Teatret. He is now a freelance actor and lives in Gvarv, Telemark. He has appeared in such boil him in the pot have their knives whetted and ready, Ibsen tells us. Grieg himself was wittily dismissive of his plays as A Doll’s House, King Lear, Hedda Gabler, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, music for the trolls’ realm: ‘I came up with something for the Mountain King’s hall that I literally can’t bear to listen Macbeth, Hamlet, The Emperor of Portugallia and Romeo and Juliet. In late November to: it reeks of cow pies, exaggerated Norwegian provincialism and trollish selfishness!’3 For the following ‘Dance 2007 he gave his last performance of Arsenic and Old Lace at Oslo Nye Teater, followed of the Mountain King’s Daughter’ he initially thought of using cowbells, as he mentioned in his letter to Hennum. by Jul i Blåfjäll on the same stage. In 2008 he toured with the monologue Njåls saga. Hans Jakob Sand is already They do not appear in the printed score, perhaps because in the 1870s cowbells were never found as a standard familiar with productions of Peer Gynt: in 2003 he was in the Norske Blåserensemble concert version of this much- orchestral instrument. In this recording we use three cowbells from the Setesdal valley of central southern Norway loved classic. Since 2003 he has been running the Poesiorkestret (poetry orchestra) together with three musicians, to give colour to the troll-girl. Three of our soloist Kirsten Bråten Berg’s cows – Vendelin, Jåla and Sylvelin – had for which he has produced Mere fjell/More Mountains and Dylan Thomas, The Absolute Poetry. He has also to get along without their bells for a few weeks! Xylophone and piano add to the exotic troll-sounds, along with appeared in many Norwegian TV shows and films. special effects like col legno (striking the strings with the wood of the bow) and rim shots on the side drum. Grieg originally used this piece to end the Peer Gynt Suite no. 2, but decided it was too closely bound up with the stage action, and removed it from the suite. He called it ‘pure parody’. When the music stops, Peer says: ‘Both the dancing and the playing – may the cat claw my tongue – were utterly delightful.’ Once again we see how Peer loves ‘playing with fire’. I find it natural to include children in the scene ‘Peer Gynt chased by the Trolls’; the orchestral score asks for ‘troll children’ here. They swarm around Peer, grabbing hold of him and biting him. The key (B minor) and the thematic material are the same as ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’, but here the tempo is a furious three-in-a-bar. Over a pedalpoint on G sharp, a distant bell sounds on D. In popular tradition, church bells and sunlight spell death 8.570871-72 813 8.570871-72 570871-72 bk Grieg 8/15/08 2:26 PM Page 12

major third, supported by a dramatic double-bass tremolo: ‘Your lover, how was it that you lost him?’ Ingigerd’s for trolls: they ‘crack’. The stage directions say: ‘The trolls take flight in an uproar of howling and shrieking. The outpouring of her feelings drew from Grieg extremely varied instrumentation and harmony. palace caves in; everything disappears.’ It is a clash of great powers. The shocking effect is reinforced when, after Later Grieg said: ‘When I had written Before a Southern Convent, Björnson – who easily got excited – was so much music in B minor, a unison B suddenly shifts down to B flat – which becomes the pedalpoint underpinning beside himself with enthusiasm.’ Their collaboration had struck a spark and Grieg immediately started work on the ‘Peer Gynt and the Bøyg’. The first time you hear this shift, it is as if the earth’s surface gives way and falls several melodrama Bergliot, about a Viking woman married to the archer-chieftain Einar Tambarskjelve. The text is based metres, and we are in a new dimension. The stage directions say it is ‘pitch black’, and ‘Peer Gynt is heard slashing on Harald Hardråde’s Saga, as written down by the poet and historian Snorre Sturlason (1179–1241/42) in the and beating about him with a big tree-branch’. The dynamic between Peer and the Bøyg is a kind of distortion of the Heimskringla.6 Harald Hardråde has lured Einar into an ambush, and Bergliot sees both her husband and her son meeting between Tamino and the Speaker in Mozart’s Magic Flute. Grieg wanted the wind instruments to be behind lying murdered. In rage, she tries to incite Einar’s men to revenge; but towards the end she becomes resigned, the scenes, with their backs to the stage and the bells of their instruments facing each other, to produce a completely reconciling herself to her fate. As in Arnljot Gelline, the underlying theme is the conflict between paganism and unique sound. He later (1901) changed this, but not his statement that he had in mind a ‘terrifyingly garish, piercing Christianity. By 1871 Franz Liszt had already composed four of his six melodramas, the first of them also named sound’. He also said: ‘Of course, this is not a question of making music, but just of trying to make the chord sound after a woman: Lenore (1860). But, as compared with Liszt, Grieg allowed music and melody to come much more as hollow and muffled as possible.’ Who or what is the Bøyg? Peer never gets a clear answer. to the fore, while still giving the text room to speak. The first performance of Bergliot was at the Kristiania7 Theatre In the third act Solveig leaves her family to live with Peer: now an outlaw and outcast, he has built himself a hut on 3 November 1885, with the Norwegian actress Laura Gundersen (1832–98) in the title role. Grieg dedicated the in the forest. But he cannot bring himself to accept her, and ‘goes roundabout’, as the Bøyg has told him to. Grieg’s work to Gundersen, and for the many performances he conducted he always took great care to find the right actor to only contribution to this act was music for the last meeting between Peer and his mother Åse, before he sets off to do justice to the part. He also had faith in the piece itself, even if he saw melodramas as inherently problematic: ‘I’d travel ‘seaward […] and further still’. When ‘Åse’s Death’ is heard from afar, in the background as Åse dies, the be the last to stick up for melodrama as an art-form, but if this poem Bergliot is to be set to music at all, it must be audience has already heard it once, as the prelude to Act 3. This death scene has parallels with the ‘buck-ride’: done as melodrama. There’s no other way.’ In twentieth-century Norway the work was particularly associated with fantasy and fairytales unite mother and son, with warmth and a smile. Peer imagines himself carrying Åse away in a the famous actress Johanne Dybwad (1867–1950), whose renditions were monumental and highly stylised. The horse-drawn sleigh to St Peter, and at first he is not aware that she is dying. The chorale, or funeral march, rises and score is pervaded by Grieg’s gift for psychological insight in characterisation, and modern interpretations that take a falls in a sombre B minor. Peer’s ‘artistic’ daydream is set in contrast with the grave reality of death, with Åse’s more realistic and subjective approach have a compelling strength of their own. My experience of performing suffering and fear, and with Peer’s own tragedy. But in spite of everything he gives his mother a relatively peaceful Bergliot in concert is that it catches the audience in a grip that is deeply moving, and speaks to us powerfully in our passing. Here, in a way, the text and the music exist on different planes. Grieg did not try to coordinate them in lives today. detail. He merely suggests when the music should begin and end. Nevertheless, the music and text do support each other, but in a different way in every new performance. Bjarte Engeset ‘Morning’ (or ‘Morning Mood’), the introduction to the scenes on the Moroccan coast in Act 4, is closely related to the music for ‘Peer Gynt and the Woman in Green’. It uses the pentatonic scale – Grieg perhaps wanted Translated by David Gallagher that to sound Arabian. The climax in this nature-evocation comes early on, with ‘the sun breaking through the clouds at the first forte’. There are imitations of birdsong and wave-like flowing figures suggestive of nature. Grieg 1 Nynorsk (‘New Norwegian’) is one of Norway’s two official written languages, used by 10–15% of the population said that the piece was ‘to be treated as pure music’, and as such it has a unique place in the drama. There can be no – including Bjarte Engeset. It grew out of the ‘national language’, Landsmål, which was formulated from doubt that ‘The Thief and the Fence’ is more character-painting theatre music than bel canto duet. The two Norwegian dialects by Ivar Aasen (1813–96) in the mid-nineteenth century. The other official written language, criminals are on the run, trying to avoid capture: ‘Very fast tempo, and the whole thing must sound hushed and Bokmål (‘Book Language’) was largely developed a little later, from the Norwegian form of Danish. secretive.’ Grieg’s instructions in the orchestral score use words like ‘reciting’ and ‘almost whispering’. In these 2 Huldre in Norwegian folklore are hill-dwelling supernatural beings in the form of seductive women – but with brief lines lie the essential problem of human heredity: ‘My father was a thief; his son must steal too’. cows’ tails. Grieg’s musical sound-world for the North African scenes is full of pizzicatos, fast accents and ricochet effects. 3 In Peer Gynt, selfishness is the defining quality of trolls: the Mountain King tells Peer that the difference between This is music of elegant sensuality, redolent of sand and dust, of sun and gold. I interpret this as the Nordic trolls and humans is ‘Man, be thyself! […] Troll, to thyself be – enough!’ barbarian Peer encountering civilisation. Both Grieg and Ibsen saw the southern countries as the home of culture. 4 The early eleventh century. St Olav (995–1030) was King of Norway from 1016 to 1028. The stage directions say: ‘Peer Gynt in oriental attire is lounging on cushions. He drinks coffee and smokes a long 5 A county in west-central Sweden, bordering Norway to the east of Trondheim. pipe. Anitra and a bevy of girls dance and sing for him.’ The ‘Arabian Dance’, Grieg told Hennum, should sound 6 A collection of tales in Old Norse, mainly about the 9th- to 12th-century Kings of Norway, compiled by the ‘really Turkish’. We have used ‘Turkish’ percussion instruments here: an Arabian drum, special tambourines and Icelandic poet and historian Snorre Sturlason (or Snorri Sturluson). Harald Hardråde (Harald the Ruthless, 1015–66) triangle, and not least a lovely, tiny cymbal made of dense metal. Grieg called the following ‘Anitra’s Dance’ ‘a was the half-brother of Saint Olav, and was King of Norway for twenty years until he invaded England and was little darling’. Its melody is related to ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’. Peer, by now middle-aged, who – in killed at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire. borrowed clothes and riding a borrowed horse – is lording it as a prophet and king in North Africa, has in reality 7 The spelling of the city’s name was changed from Christiania to Kristiania in 1877. become a reckless, opportunistic capitalist. He is full of platitudes and quotations, both in his dialogue with Anitra and in ‘Peer Gynt’s Serenade’. Like a peasant who fancies himself as Don Giovanni, Peer strikes up a tune on his 8.570871-72 12 9 8.570871-72 570871-72 bk Grieg 8/15/08 2:26 PM Page 10

Arab lute and uses everything he has learnt just for effect, trying to seduce Anitra. Grieg wrote to Hennum about this consolation, and perhaps also with Goethe’s Ewigweibliche – the ‘Eternal Feminine’. The aged Peer is cradled by song: ‘It must sound half voluptuously passionate, half ironic’. Peer’s frisky leaps and over-the-top camel-riding Solveig like a boy in the arms of his mother. Grieg also discusses the accompaniment’s rocking pulse in his letter to bellydance fail to work: at the end of the melodrama ‘Peer Gynt and Anitra’ the whole thing turns out disastrously Hennum, where he asks for a diminuendo in every bar. This highly symbolic final scene is open to various different for him. She runs off with his gold, leaving him all alone in the sand. At which point the scene suddenly changes to interpretations. If Peer Gynt is seen as a work about how it is possible to move beyond narcissism, then Solveig is an the north, and a landscape of mountains and forests bathed in summer sunshine. It was this piece, ‘Solveig’s Song’, absolutely essential mirror for Peer: she says that Peer was always himself in her faith, hope and love. Many of that Grieg composed first after he said ‘yes please’ to writing the music for Ibsen. It was ‘easy’, he said. The Grieg’s cradle songs set texts associated with death, perhaps reflecting Grieg’s own grief at the death of his baby introduction on unison strings, muted yet strong and full of yearning, shows Solveig’s integrity and sense of daughter. He told Ibsen that it was precisely here, in the closing scene, that he felt he had given of his best. purpose, her faithfulness and her timeless, steadfast love. Solveig ‘calls to her goats, spins and sings’. In ‘Peer Gynt Ibsen’s ethical and philosophical perspective was important to Grieg: ‘the performance of Peer Gynt can do at the Statue of Memnon’ we are back to the quiet sandy sounds that ended the scene with Anitra, and Peer (now in some good just now in Christiania (Oslo), where materialism is on the up and is trying to choke everything we find Egypt) face-to-face with culture: ‘Honestly, – I really thought the statue made a sound! It was ancient music. I heard best and most sacred; I think we need to hold up a mirror to all this egotism, and Peer Gynt is just such a mirror.’ the stone voice rising and falling. – I will make a note of it for the scholars to think about. (Writes in his pocket Some Ibsen scholars have expressed surprise that the arch-realist Ibsen should have given the ending such an notebook:) “The statue sang. I heard the sound clearly, but I couldn’t quite catch the words. It was all an illusion, of irrational religious slant. For us as performers, personal experience of this ending is as important as theories about it. course. – Nothing else of any importance to report today.”’ It is in Egypt that Peer finally lands up in a kind of We can only try to present it with dedication and insight so that you as a listener can have your own ‘meeting’ with surrealistic prison, a ‘madhouse’, surrounded by strange characters who highlight his egoism, derisively crowning this music, and perhaps feel yourself, too, reflected in it. the prostrate Peer as ‘Emperor of the Self’. The dramatic, nature-painting, chromatic piece ‘Peer Gynt’s Homecoming’ is well known from the Peer Gynt Foran Sydens Kloster, Op. 20 • Bergliot, Op. 42 Suite No. 2. Musically, it has parallels with Wagner’s Flying Dutchman, especially the Overture. Less famous is the following movement, ‘The Shipwreck’, which is mostly made up of theatrical effects. The wind machine we include Get moving! You can do it, I’m sure; broad, clear music that costs you nothing; read the sagas and put yourself in here does not appear in the orchestral score, but it was often used in the theatre, and Grieg may have had this effect the mood! (Björnstjerne Björnson to Edvard Grieg, 1872) in mind: ‘The thing is, there are very few places where the music is just music – it certainly skates on the thin ice of caricature, and the characterisation often needs to be that crude precisely to make sure the audience understand what In the early 1870s, just before he composed the Peer Gynt score, Grieg had done a lot of work on other dramatic it’s all about.’ music. He was living at that time in Christiania (Oslo), where he collaborated with the writer and public figure Peer survives the shipwreck by clinging to the keel of an upturned dinghy and fighting off anyone else who tries Björnstjerne Björnson (1832–1910), who was an important inspiration: ‘He did not understand music, but he to clamber up beside him. But, all the same, he is now slowly beginning to develop self-awareness. The grave, believed in what I was trying to do, and that gave me courage.’ Both works to Björnson texts on this recording took muted G-minor song ‘Solveig Sings in the Hut’ has an important function at this point. The key of G minor usually shape in 1871, though Bergliot was completed only in 1885. Before a Southern Convent was intended to be a scene appears whenever Grieg goes really deeply into existential questions. The song becomes the catalyst for the in a larger work, based on Björnson’s epic poem Arnljot Gelline. Like Grieg’s planned opera Olav Tryggvason (also necessary process of Peer’s redemption: ‘One who has remembered, – and one who has forgot.’ Solveig sings to her to words by Björnson), it was never finished. Grieg dedicated this scene to Franz Liszt: ‘You well understand the ‘beloved boy, so far away’, which also hints at her symbolic role as ‘mother’ in the final scene. connection in my mind with Liszt,’ he wrote to his friend, the Danish composer August Winding (1835–99): ‘Do In the ‘Night Scene’ the offstage chorus is cast, surrealistically, as ‘balls of thread‘, ‘withered leaves’, ‘sighs in you remember when we stood before that convent by the Arch of Titus in Rome, and what unforgettable times we the air’, ‘drops of dew’ and ‘broken straws’. Ibsen’s stage directions must also have sparked the imagination of spent out there?’ Originally Grieg was going to dedicate Before a Southern Convent to another Danish composer, Grieg the sound-artist: ‘Night. A blasted heath. Pines devastated by fire. Charred treetrunks for miles. White mists Johan Peter Emilius Hartmann (1805–1900), but he learnt that Hartmann had already set the same text himself. here and there above the forest floor.’ The text takes us deep into a world of symbolism: it is as if the landscape Grieg often conducted this work on his concert tours, and from what he said in his letters we can tell that he valued gives concrete natural form to Peer’s spiritual ruin. Grieg underscores this sense of the unreal by, among other it highly. Today it is seldom performed, at least partly because it uses somewhat unusual forces, with two soloists things, asking that the chorus, the organ and the voice of Peer’s dead mother Åse be in different offstage locations. and a female chorus. The action of Arnljot Gelline takes place in the time of St. Olav.4 Ingigerd, a chieftain’s When we see Solveig again, it is in a religious light, with (Ibsen says) a ‘hymnbook wrapped in her headscarf’. daughter from Jämtland,5 has seen her father killed by the outlawed warrior-hero Arnljot because he refused to give Grieg suggested that the chorus’s offstage ‘Whitsun Hymn’ should be ‘performed like peasant hymn-singing’, ‘in a Ingigerd to Arnljot as a peace offering. Arnljot captures Ingigerd, but then, out of pity, lets her go free. Ingigerd dragging, country way’. The hymn was not included in all of his various reworkings of ‘Solveig’s Lullaby’, but feels attracted to Arnljot, and is now tormented by a sense of guilt, confusion and despair. In this ‘fourth song’ she is personally I feel that this version with the hymn is particularly inspired, for example in the long sequence of quiet at a convent gate in a southern land, where she is interrogated by the prioress or another eminent sister. At the end a chords after the words ‘Sleep, sleep’. The orchestral sounds here may bring to mind distant bells, and point forward chorus of nuns inside the convent bids her welcome into the grace of God. We can perhaps sense that this piece was to the sound-fantasy Klokkeklang (Ringing Bells), Op. 54 (Naxos 8.557854). Originally Ibsen had the doomladen conceived as part of a larger work. Here too there are parallels to Tamino’s meeting with the Speaker in The Magic voice of the Button-moulder at the end of the lullaby, but Grieg moved it earlier, before Solveig sings. The scene is Flute. The contrast between the two characters is clearly drawn in Grieg’s music. The nun asks question after full of premonitions of death. We are not sure how long Peer has left to him. There are associations with religious question, always to the same melody and harmony, until for her last lines, emotionally moved, she modulates up a

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Peer Gynt, Op. 23 Gjermund Larsen

Kirsten Bråten Berg Act IV

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Act III

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Lund School of Culture Choruses CD 1 75:58 Act IV

$ Prelude. Åse’s Death (Forspill. Åses død) 3:56 ! Bergliot, Op. 42 18:45 % Åse’s Death (Åses død) 7:47 (Text: Björnstjerne Björnson)

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Bergliot Bergliot ...... Frøydis Armand

Malmö Symphony Orchestra 8.557991 Bjarte Engeset

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Get this free download from Classicsonline! Svendsen: Norwegian Folksong: I Fjol gjaett’e Gjeitinn: Andantino Copy this Promotion Code Nax65iW92KhM and go to www.classicsonline.com/mpkey/sve12_main. Downloading Instructions 1 Log on to Classicsonline. If you do not have a Classicsonline account yet, please register at http://www.classicsonline.com/UserLogIn/SignUp.aspx. 2 Enter the Promotion Code mentioned above. 3 On the next screen, click on “Add to My Downloads”. 8.570871-72 20 CMYK NAXOS NAXOS Grieg’s incidental music for Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt (1874-5) won immediate success and ranks among his most enduringly popular compositions, its huge range of orchestral tone-colours and creative use of space captured on this recording by placing actors, chorus, and folk musicians both onstage and behind the scenes. Foran Sydens Kloster, composed in 1871 as an interlude for DDD

GRIEG: Bjørnson’s heroic play Arnljot Gelline, and Bergliot, a monodrama written in the same year and GRIEG: orchestrated in 1875, reveal Grieg as a master composer of dramatic and lyrical stage music. 8.570871-72

Edvard Playing Time 2:08:04 erGynt (Complete Incidental Music) Peer GRIEG Gynt (Complete Incidental Music) Peer (1843-1907) Peer Gynt (Complete Incidental Music), Op. 23 CD 1 75:58 CD 2 52:06 Peer Gynt, Op. 23* 1-9 Act V 23:56 1-4 Act I 12:48 0 Before a Southern Convent 5-# Act II 23:55 (Foran Sydens Kloster), $-% Act III 11:44 Op. 20* 9:26 www.naxos.com Disc made in Canada. Printed and assembled USA. Booklet notes in English ^-¢ Act IV 27:32 ! Bergliot, Op. 42 18:45 &

Soloists • Malmö Chamber Choir* 2008 Naxos Rights International Ltd. Malmö Symphony Orchestra • Bjarte Engeset Includes Free Downloadable Bonus Track available at www.classicsonline.com Please see inside booklet for full details A full track list and artists’ details can be found on pages 2 and 3 of the booklet The Norwegian sung texts and English translations can be accessed at www.naxos.com/libretti/570871.htm Recorded at the Concert Hall of the Malmö Symphony Orchestra, Sweden, from 29th September to 2nd October, 2007 (Peer Gynt); on 11th January, 2008 (Before a Southern Convent); and on 23rd August, 2006 (Bergliot) 8.570871-72 8.570871-72 Producer and editor: Morten Mogensen • Engineer: Erik B. Nielsen Mastering: Morten Mogensen and Claus Byrith • Booklet notes: Bjarte Engeset • Publisher: Edition Peters Cover image: Jonsokbål (K173) by Nicolai Astrup (1880-1928) (©Sparebankstiftelsen DnB NOR, Norway); Photograph: Erik Fuglseth, Norway