Search - Edvard Grieg, Landon Ronald, Percy Grainger :: Grieg: The Piano Music in Historic Interpretations

Sepia album leaves from an analog age

emtube | Japan | 01/23/2002

(4 out of 5 stars)

"As the main reviewer stated, this is an album of historical recordings with often limited fidelity and with minimal digital filtration technology applied. However, this is a matter of policy rather than neglect: instead of sandblasting the surface noise out of existence at whatever the cost, a balance has been struck to assure that whatever pure instrumental timbre and nuance can be found in the grooves is allowed to remain. The result is perhaps somewhat closer to what records really sounded like in those days, but in any case, the ear can adjust to the hiss--also, to avoid the anachronistic jarring contrast between CD silence and analog "surface liveliness", the producers have filled the space between tracks with surface noise from the actual disks themselves!
For the connoisseur of historical performances of classical piano music, this album is a feast. What a treat to hear the interpretations on record and piano roll by the aging Grieg of his own music! (Another recording of Grieg accompanying his wife Nina's singing is available on the companion album "Grieg: The Vocal Music in Historic Interpretations".) And several of the oldest performers were indeed friends and colleagues of Grieg, who had the benefit of his guidance in performance stylistics.
For me, some of the highlights included performances by Grieg's friend and a wonderful Belgian aristocrat of the piano, Arthur de Greef; the characteristic rhythmic snap of Rachmaninoff's interpretations; the infinitely nuanced yet utterly natural and spacious tone paintings by the pre-war Gieseking; and characterful renditions by Grieg's younger protege, the eccentric Australian pianist Percy Grainger, in recordings ranging from 1908 to 1957. Now forgotten but once important figures such as Rudolf Ganz and Olga Samaroff are also represented, along with a number of Scandanavian pianists whose resonance with Grieg's music is evident.
The set is arranged chronologically by the date of each performer's oldest recording, and many of the same short pieces are repeated over and over (the pre-LP recorded repertoire in particular tended to be limited to the shorter, more popular pieces), so this may be an album to dip into from time to time rather than devour straight through. Nevertheless, it is utterly delightful to hear how these simple romantic pieces can take flight from the fingers of artists of a period before time was defined by atomic clocks, and followed instead the logic of the heart."