Grieg: Piano Music, Vol. 2 - Improvisations on 2 Norwegian Folk Songs, 25 Norwegian Folk Songs and Dances

Steen-Nøkleberg, Einar

8.550882

Einar Steen-Nøkleberg has recorded every note of music Grieg composed for the piano. He as impressive musical credentials and is, among other things, the author of a book on Grieg’s piano music and its interpretations. His survey displaces earlier sets in quality: he is responsive to mood and is searchingly imaginative in his approach.

Einar Steen-Nøkleberg does not proceed chronologically: the first disc couples early and late Grieg—the very earliest of his published pieces, written while he was still studying at Leipzig, the Humoresques, Op. 6, and the E minor Piano Sonata, Op. 7, alongside the Stimmungen (‘Moods’), Op. 73, composed in the early years of the 20th century (1901–5). Whether the music is early or late, Steen-Nøkleberg plays with total sympathy and dedication, and he is beautifully recorded throughout in the Lindeman Hall of the Norwegian State Academy of Music. Only in the Sonata does he suffer a trace of self-consciousness.

The vo.2 includes the remarkable Nineteen Norwegian Folksongs, Op. 66, which are contemporaneous with what many would see as Grieg’s masterpiece, the song-cycle Haugtussa, which the composer himself spoke of as full of ‘hair-raising’ chromatic harmonies. (One of the folksongs appears in Delius’s On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring.) But the earlier set, Op. 17, written not long after the first version of the Piano Concerto, is also full of delights.• Penguin Guide, January 2009

CD x 1

Naxos

07.08.95

730099588225