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About Grieg: Lyric Pieces
Product description CD Amazon.com Grieg's 66 Lyric Pieces range from simple pretty tunes like the early "Arietta" that opens this disc to more extended pieces like the dashing "Wedding Day at Troldhaugen" to impressionistic miniature tone poems like the late "Summer Evening." Here, Andsnes plays 24 of them, well-chosen to cover a representative selection from the complete sets. He plays them beautifully, with a lovely tone, virtuoso polish when such is called for, as in the express ride of "March of the Trolls," and poetic depth of feeling, as in "The Brook," where in his interpretation you can almost smell the grass and see the light ripples of the water. Gilels's selection on DG, with minimum overlap, is still unmatched, but Andsnes's well-recorded recital is a source of endless pleasures. Of added interest, the recording was made at Grieg's home, now a museum, on his 1892 Steinway. --Dan Davis Review From time to time pianists have experimented with recording on less than full-sized instruments and/or on especially well-preserved or reconditioned pre-modern Steinways. Mikhail Pletnev's 1998 recital on Rachmaninov's Steinway in his villa near Lucerne was an outstandingly successful example (available on DG 459 634-2). And here is another.As Leif Ove Andsnes tells us, Grieg's model B Steinway of 1892 sits 'in the high-ceilinged, wood-floored and wood-panelled drawing room at Troldhaugen', the villa on the outskirts of Bergen now preserved as a Grieg museum. The instrument itself was presented to the composer and his wife for their Silver Wedding anniversary. For once it's impossible to regret that the recording captures so much of an empty-room acoustic. Transparency is the first quality that strikes you. This is partly a feature of the instrument itself, with its absence of excessive resonance, its harp-like bass, nut-brown middle register and bell-like treble; and it's partly that the open perspectives of the recording allow you to imagine the surroundings of pure Norwegian air.As with all the best early-piano recordings, this means that the instrument can be pushed to the limit without screaming blue murder. Andsnes can lay into the 'March of the Trolls' from Op. 54, for instance, without worrying that the sound-picture might saturate, and the result is a wonderfully gleeful elan. Although this and the 'Nocturne' from the same set were composed the year before the piano was manufactured, they sound as though written with its qualities in mind. In the 'Canon'from Op. 38 Andsnes can pedal richly without endangering clarity; the resulting halo effect is one that composers of Grieg's time knew well but that the modern piano struggles to re-create.The same instrument played by a less-than-comprehensively equipped pianist might not occasion any special comment. But Andsnes displays a truly impressive level of mastery and a virtually ideal blend of affection and unselfconscious nuance. Being Norwegian and having imbibed this music with his mother's milk is only part of the story. Listen to his compatriot, Hakon Austbo, and you will find Lisztian over-statement and a curiously unsure sense of idiom.Andsnes's new disc makes the perfect complement to his 1992 selection of Lyric Pieces (from which happily only three items are duplicated) and to Emil Gilels's still classic survey. David Fanning --
