Customer Reviews

Grieg: Piano Music, Vol. 1

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

And I will repeat myself: The Piano Sonata is Amazing! I can't understand why this amazing piano piece, from all of grieg's piano music, is so forgotten. Each and each movement is so unique with it's rhythems, the way Grieg spreads all over the keyboard (mainly in the second and fourth movement), and much more. Each movement carries you into different worlds and moods. I bought this performance mainly because of the price, and because I wanted a reliable performance of the sonata (Einar Steen-Nökleberg is the editor of Greig's piano music for Henle), unlike the perfrmance of Glenn Gould that I already have, which is also great but not so accurate, and I didn't regret! This is a recommended purchase for everyone interested in great and not so well known Classical Music (My piano teacher, for example, didn't know this sonata, until I lent her the Glenn Gould performance).

The complete piano music of Edvard Grieg is one of those extremely commendable projects undertaken by Naxos (and it is almost a surprise to realize how much there is of it), and it was an excellent choice to give it to the Grieg expert Einar Steen-Nøkleberg whose playing throughout the series is consistently fine (if not quite in the league of, say, Andsnes or Gilels in those surprisingly few works where competing alternatives are readily available). Most of the works are colorful miniatures, and Grieg's impressive ability to create harmonic color and inventive melodies only rarely flags.

The first volume includes his early and surprisingly fine sonata - one of only two large-scale works Grieg wrote for the solo piano. True, he sometimes seem to struggle with the form, but the inventive colorations and memorability of his ideas make up for any reservations in that respect. The op. 1 pieces frankly are less interesting (but still worth a listen), and the same goes for the op. 6 humoresques (and the short and slight Sirens' enticement). The funeral march - more famous in its orchestral version - is, however, close to being a minor masterpiece, and the same goes for the piano arrangement of "Jeg elsker dig", one of his most famous and delightful songs.

The "Stemninger" op. 73 is his last published piano collection (thus post-dating his series of Lyrical Pieces), and has often been thought of as "difficult". They turn out, however, to be quite on par with the lyrical pieces - delightful, atmospheric works - although the harmonic and tonal language is subtly more advanced and austere than in the more famous earlier works. Steen-Nøkleberg plays everything with a strong sense of poetry and color, although I sometimes miss a sharper focus on rhythm. The Naxos sound is fine, and this is, again, a very welcome release. Recommended.