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"A. Totter" gives an energetic performance of the "Trolls' March" from Book V of Grieg's Lyric Pieces. The A-B-A form (fast outer section, lyrical center section, fast outer section repeated) suited Grieg's musical tone-painting well and was used frequently in these pieces.

by Ken

We could hardly make a greater leap than from the cosmic-scaled symphonies of Mahler to some of the most intimate miniatures in the musical literature, the Norwegian-born Edvard Grieg's Lyric Pieces. (I might note, though, that the Mahler Wunderhorn songs we sampled are themselves some of the most exquisite of musical miniatures.)

Between 1867 and 1901, the meat of his creative years, Grieg (1843-1907) published ten books of Lyric Pieces -- most often six to a book, but ranging up to eight, for a total of 66. They became the musical repository of whatever happened to be on his mind: specifically Norwegian people, places, and moods, historical and mythological sketches, little nature poems, even tiny metaphysical queries. Some of them run under a minute; a very few go over the six-minute mark; three to four minutes is the typical range.

The pieces are relatively easy to play, which is why you'll see and (groan) hear tots grinding them out all over YouTube, but they're not at all easy to play really well. For starters, we're going to hear a more or less random selection of the pieces from the wonderful three-CD recording of all ten books of Lyric Pieces made by the distinguished British pianist Peter Katin in late December 1989 for the British Unicorn-Kanchana label. You won't hear anything flamboyant or spellbindingly original in the performances, but in miniatures like these you don't have the luxury of sort of ambling toward the goal, you've got to be dead on, and it would be hard to top the beauty and clarity of touch or the logic and elegance of phrasing served up by Katin. (For something closer to spellbindingly individual, down below we've got performances of two of the Op. 54 Lyric Pieces by the inimitable Arthur Rubinstein.)

Book I (Op. 12), No. 6: Watchman's Song

The piece has for me the timeless, or maybe outside-of-time feeling of a medieval chorale, with the harmonies beautifully rung and balanced by the pianist.

Book III (Op. 43), No. 6: To Spring

A charming, breezy invocation, again with exceptionally beautiful voicing of the decorative passagework, unforced in movement yet without dragging.

Book VIII (Op. 65), No. 6, Wedding Day at Troldhaugen

Grieg had a singular flair for music for festive occasions, and for (I think) obvious reasons this is one of his most-loved little pieces.

Book X (Op. 71), No. 7: Recollection

This is the very last of the Lyric Pieces, and a beautiful demonstration of how Grieg could make an abstract subject feel tangible.

Now we're going to hear an entire set of Lyric Pieces: Book V (Op. 54), the one that contains the "Trolls' March we saw and heard at the top of this post. This set happens to have been almost all orchestrated, although not at Grieg's instigation, but ultimately with his approval. Orchestrations of Nos. 2-4 and 6 were undertaken by the Hungarian-born conductor Anton Seidl (1850-1898), who as a young man participated in the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876 and went on to become a mainstay of the young Metropolitan Opera and music director of the New York Philharmonic from 1891 until his death.

The Seidl orchestrations were then sent to Grieg, who was more than a little surprised, but apparently pleased enough to tinker with the orchestrations himself. Eventually he discarded "Bell-Ringing," either because it overwhelmed the other pieces or because he felt its harmonic daring worked better on the piano, and by way of replacement added his own orchestration of No. 1, "Shepherd Boy."

A good case can be made that in all these cases that the piano originals exceed the orchestration in ingenuity and stimulation of the imagination. In other words, there's a reason why Grieg himself felt little impulse to orchestrate or otherwise arrange the piano originals of the Lyric Pieces.

We're going to hear now the piano originals of all six pieces from Book V (plus bonus performances of two of them by Arthur Rubinstein, including a very speedy "Trolls' March"). The five numbers that were orchestrated are supplemented by an orchestral performance that's reasonably close in pacing to Peter Katin's piano performance.

GRIEG: Lyric Pieces, Book V, Op. 54

Peter Katin, piano. Unicorn-Kanchana, recorded Dec. 27-31, 1989

No. 1, Shepherd Boy