Edvard Grieg
Edvard Grieg folds Norwegian folk song and dance into Romantic chamber and orchestral music: cello and violin sonatas of sudden lyricism and driving motifs, glowing Lyric Pieces and Elegiac Melodies, and the Peer Gynt suites that still colour how the north sounds.
He is happiest in miniature forms and lyrical moods, yet the work is never merely gentle. The Cello Sonata in A minor moves from agitated urgency to soulful calm and openly Norwegian coda material; paired with the Elegiac Melodies it leaves a minor-key optimism rather than gloom. The early Violin Sonata No. 1 already wears his fingerprints, its middle movement threaded with song and springar dance. Piano nocturnes ask for breadth and quiet precision. Songs, the Holberg Suite, and incidental music for Ibsen sit beside the folk-inflected dances he wanted played with real bite. The aim, in his own spirit, is music people can live inside: warm, specific, and unmistakably of Norway.
Compositions by Edvard Grieg appear on
Northern Cello
Music for cello from northern European composers. Zoe Knighton and pianist Ian Munro centre the programme on Grieg’s romantic sonata, with Sibelius’s Op. 78 pieces, Vasks’s solo Gramata Cellam and Pärt’s Fratres.
Summer Waves
Len Vorster plays a personal recital of short piano works by Gershwin, de Falla, Lord Berners, Berkeley, Field, Grieg, Debussy, Poulenc and Ravel, drawn toward summer light, dance rhythm and nocturne stillness.
Music for Strings
String orchestra music from Wolf-Ferrari and Grieg to Britten, Grainger and living Australian voices. Gerald Gentry leads the Southern Cross Philharmonia, with Amir Farid at the piano in Grainger’s clog-dance romp.