Complete Piano Works

Description

The highly regarded Grieg collection by Håkon Austbø has been reissued with a recent recording of the four-hand repertoire, making it the most complete integral available of the composer's piano music and, by extension, a window into the soul of this most profound Scandinavian romantic poet.Edvard Grieg was a talented young pianist when the violinist Ole Bull heard him play and immediately recognized in him a gift worth cultivating. Although he later composed a symphony and a few other large-scale works, it was above all at the piano that Grieg found his path, particularly through the songs without words he called Lyric Pieces. These follow in the tradition of the instrumental sound pictures of Schumann and Mendelssohn, while conveying the lyrical impulse that made him an equally talented composer, especially after his marriage to his cousin Nina, in whom he found the singer who best understood him and his music.Nina also played the piano with such talent that she formed a duo with her husband. In this context, one can understand the transcriptions of his orchestral suites Holberg and Peer Gynt not as mere opportunistic commissioned work, intended to exploit the domestic market for listening to orchestral classics at home, but as an act of intimate devotion. In the gentle neo-baroque dances of the Holberg Suite, brilliantly performed by two pianists side by side, one perceives a touching communion.At the same time, the ten books of Lyric Pieces formed a kind of diary to which Grieg returned and entrusted some of his most intimate and experimental thoughts throughout his career. Whether evoking nature, a solitary thought, or the gaze of a loved one, the Lyric Pieces get straight to the point, often with a disarming simplicity that conceals a certain formal and technical sophistication.Jed Distler of Classics Today, awarding a score of 10/10 to Håkon Austbø's integral for performance and sound quality, stated: "Austbø's interpretations are always direct, idiomatic, and naturally flowing... his vigorous and dynamic playing mirrors Grieg's own pianistic style... You will not find a performance of Grieg's piano music of this quality anywhere else."