Piano Concerto 4

Tveitt (Artist), Gimse (Artist), Sussmann (Artist), Engeset (Artist), Rsno (Artist)

Product Details

• Audio CD (October 22, 2002)
• SPARS Code: DDD
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Naxos
• ASIN: B00006GO45
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #224,257 in Music (See Bestsellers in Music)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Moment of Discovery: Treasures Hidden by Time, Accident, and Memory Lapse, October 22, 2005

By	Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Just when you think you are up on all aspects of contemporary music and the vast amount of compositions of the 20th Century, up pops a composer brought to your attention through the auspices of Classical Public Radio to prove there are many more hidden treasures to discover. Driving home from a LA Phil concert the car radio music on KUSC was so exciting, so fresh, and so defiant of classification that it demanded investigation. It happened to be a performance of Geirr Tveitt's 'Baldur's Dream: Symbolic Play for Dance and Orchestra' and the three voices were enmeshed in a score of wide percussive entanglements and pulsating rhythms, a work that was so excitingly strange and beautiful that it drove me to explore this newly discovered composer Geirr Treitt.

What a revelation! This recording of two works for pianos/piano and orchestra is an excellent starting point. Treitt is an uncommonly interesting composer from Norway whose rather large and very important output of scores were destroyed by fire in 1970. Due to the diligence of scholars, many of these scores are being reconstructed (the 'Baldur's Dream' I heard was reconstructed based on a live radio performance!), so hopefully we will begin to hear this amazing body of work.

Treitt has the same passion for folksongs that so influenced Mahler, Bartok, Kodaly, Grieg and now Golijov, Gorecki etc. His orchestral writing (it seems from the small amount I have begun to collect) emphasizes imaginative percussive elements while his use of the piano as a solo instrument in a concerto goes beyond the usual format: his drive seems to have been one of creating rich colors and ethereal moods. The results are exquisitely beautiful music. The performances on this recording by Royal Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Bjarte Engeset with pianists Havard Gimse and Gunilla Sussmann are exciting. This recording, and especially this composer, are Highly Recommended! Grady Harp, October 05

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly recommended!, December 30, 2005

By	Paul Graziano (Burlington, VT United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I am not a musician, so I can not elaborate in technical terms what makes the 4th piano concerto so special. However, as a lover of the medium, I feel it is one of the best from the later half of the 20th century. The title of "Aurora Borealis" seems particularily apt to me, as the work seems less an expression of nature through a human's eyes, as it is a sheer force of nature in itself. It is somewhat modernistic, and I think if Bartok doesn't make you squeamish, you'll enjoy this greatly. Tveitt's earlier piano concertos (with more touches of Rachmaninov and Prokofiev) , while not as distinctive, are very worthwhile as well. But the 4th concerto is the real gem! I hope this doesn't go out of print!

5.0 out of 5 stars Magnificent, September 29, 2009

By	G.D. (Norway) - See all my reviews

The story about the disaster that hit Geirr Tveitt in the early seventies, when a fire at his farm consumed most of his huge output (some say about 75 % of it, but several works once presumed lost have resurfaced later) leaving the composer a broken man for the rest of his life, is by now rather well known. Both Naxos and BIS have recorded the extant piano concertos (nos. 1 and 5, plus the reconstructed no. 4 and the Hardanger variations - while no. 3 was lost in the fire there exists, apparently, a radio recording from the forties, so a reconstruction isn't completely out of the question, and judging from the quality of the ones we've got, it would be a more than worthwhile project). The music itself is Norwegian through and through, heavily indebted to folk music if not using actual folk melodies. It is rhythmically alive and contains some very strong themes; stylistically, Ravel and Bartok are brought to mind, but Tveitt was never less than his own man; the music here is excellently laid out for the piano and the scoring is inventive and colorful. One might perhaps expect the influence of Grieg, but where Grieg is at his most effective in reflective, atmospheric tone pictures, Tveitt's music is fiery and wild; this is music of craggy mountains and trollish magic; pulsating with life, demonically possessed, smoldering with fire and (in short) highly evocative.

I won't go through the rather complicated stories behind the reconstructions of the works on this disc, but whatever has been done they sound at least entirely idiomatic. The Variations on a Folksong from Hardanger for two pianos and orchestra might at 31 one minutes look overlong on paper, but there is really not a single moment here where the music fails to grab one's attention. It is viscerally effective, brimful of good ideas that are inventively applied and developed; it is harmonically adventurous and the scoring is colorful. The fourth piano concerto is similar in style, containing almost barbaric power and wild swirls of color, often employing ancient modes, shifiting to dreamlike, glittering tonal landscapes; rhythmically alive and excellently constructed, this concerto is not far short of being a masterpiece (if any distance away at all).

Fortunately the performances are exemplary. In the Variations Gimse and Süssmann do not only display a real feel for the music (in addition to being technically accomplished); the interaction between the soloists is also highly impressive, as is their interaction with the colorful and energetic performances from orchestra, superbly lead by Bjarte Engeset. Gimse is no less impressive in the fourth concerto and again he is magnificently supported by the Royal Scottish players. Sound quality is no less than fabulous; clear and richly detailed. This, then, as well as its companion containing the first and fifth concertos, is little short of an essential acquisition.