FOR STRING ORCHESTRA
Malmo Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Bjarte Engeset. Naxos 8.572403; CD.
DESPITE his popularity in his own day, especially in his native Norway, Edvard Grieg was plagued with doubts about his skills. He was more comfortable writing piano pieces, songs and chamber works than pieces for orchestra, and he never wrote the Norwegian national opera his countrymen expected of him. Yet he is best loved today for his large-scale orchestral scores: the “Peer Gynt” Suites and the Piano Concerto.
A new addition to a generous series of Grieg recordings on the Naxos label offers his music for strings, beautifully played by the Malmo Symphony Orchestra of Sweden under the conductor Bjarte Engeset. Writing for just this segment empowered Grieg, and these works are masterly. Grieg favored a big string sound, which this orchestra provides, rather than the more traditional chamber ensemble of strings.
Grieg often mined folk tunes for melodic ideas, and many of the pieces here are arrangements of his songs and piano pieces. “Two Elegiac Melodies,” originally songs, shimmer and glow in their string versions. In the second one, “The Last Spring,” every twist in the beguiling melody, at once poignant and consoling, is cushioned with Grieg’s plaintive chromatic harmonies.
The “Holberg Suite” (in full, “From Holberg’s Time: Suite in Olden Style”) is drawn from music Grieg wrote in 1884 to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of the playwright Ludvig Holberg. Though this is a witty and skillfully scored neo-Rococo suite, in Grieg’s hands the Gavotte and Rigaudon are touched with the heavy-footed bounce of Norwegian folk dance as well as some inner sadness. Grieg’s string arrangement of his piano piece “In the Cradle” lends depth and texture to this tender lullaby. And for a tune that you hear once and cannot get out of your head try “Cow-Call” from “Two Nordic Melodies.” /ANTHONY TOMMASINI
