Edvard Grieg Piano Concerto
Saturday March 17 (08:00 PM)
First Baptist Church, New Orleans
The most successful and best known of nineteenth-century Scandinavian composers, Edvard Grieg, was one of the great exponents of Romantic nationalism. He saw it as his role in life to bring Scandinavian musical and literary culture to the attention of the rest of Europe. As composer, pianist and conductor he became a sought-after fixture in Europe’s music centers. His wife Nina was an accomplished singer, and the two traveled extensively together, popularizing his songs and piano works. In the process, he also helped introduce to the rest of Europe the writings of Scandinavian poets and dramatists, particularly Henrik Ibsen, for whose play Peer Gynt he composed incidental music.
As a student Grieg had been a failure. He quit school at 15 never to return. Under the sponsorship of Norwegian violinist Ole Bull, he was granted a scholarship to the Conservatory in Leipzig but hated his teachers and never forgave them their conservatism and pedantry. Understandably, he was not happy with the constraints of the classical sonata form; of all his surviving output, only eight works fall into this category: a youthful symphony, the famous piano concerto, a string quartet, a piano sonata, three violin sonatas and a cello sonata. In all his other compositions he insisted on the freedom of form so dear to the Romantic tradition.
All his life, Grieg felt most comfortable with and excelled in smaller musical forms: songs, miniature piano pieces, orchestral dances and re-workings of folk melodies. His aptitude for orchestration was indifferent at best. It is, therefore, surprising that his piano concerto, his only completed large-scale orchestral work outside of the student symphony, would end up as one of the most popular Romantic concertos.
Composed in 1868 and revised extensively five times, the last revision coming shortly before the composer’s death, the Concerto was modeled after the Piano Concerto of Robert Schumann, with considerable Lisztian influence. Franz Liszt was Grieg’s idol, and he consulted with the older composer on phrasing and piano technique, particularly in the large cadenza. While the Concerto’s themes are not ethnic Norwegian – it was written before Grieg became interested in Norway’s folk music – it still has a “Northern” mood and does incorporate Norwegian dance rhythms. Early in its career the Concerto was not well received since its apparent introverted style was foreign to a public used to the fire and bravura of concerti à la Liszt. Ironically, it was the enthusiastic endorsement by Liszt himself that turned the tide and converted both audiences and pianists to the work. Later in his life – his hero worship notwithstanding – Grieg had second thoughts about some of Liszt’s suggestions, and in the last revised version removed some of the latter’s more bombastic additions. This final version is the one commonly heard today.
Emulating his models, Grieg opens the Concerto with a strong piano declamation, spanning almost the entire range of the keyboard and followed by a wave of arpeggios before the first theme appears in the orchestra. Only then is the theme taken up by the piano and elaborated. During the transition into the second theme, Grieg reveals his debt to his mentor, Liszt, with passages of unusual dissonance and ambiguous tonality that resolve into lyric expansiveness . The cellos introduce a lyrical second theme although in the earlier versions Grieg had scored it for the trumpets (probably on Liszt’s advice). The written-out cadenza is expansive and, of course, technically challenging. The second movement Adagio is a tender song-like theme on muted strings. When the piano finally enters, it gently embellishes the theme.
It is in the last movement that Grieg’s folk impulses break out in a Norwegian dance, the halling. But a gentle middle section introduced by the flute with string accompaniment serves as a contrast to the ebullient dance. After a brief cadenza, the soloist launches into a coda recasting the dance theme into the rapid triple time of the popular Norwegian springdans. The Concerto ends with the gentle flute theme now thundered out by orchestra and soloist.
Price
$20-98