Presented at the Grieg Conference in Bergen May 31, 2015
Gloria Cook, DMA and
Megan Mascarenhas, BA
Rollins College, Department of Music
Winter Park, Florida, USA
Sets versus Opuses:
A Novel Approach to Programming Edvard Grieg’s Piano Works
Edvard Grieg, a composer best known for his incidental music the “Peer Gynt Suite” and the “Klaverkonsert i a-moll” (“Concerto in A minor”), composed over 300 works that are identified by 74 opuses and over 150 pieces of piano music that are without opus numbers. Of those with opus numbers, over 20 were written for the piano. When it comes to performing Grieg’s piano works on stage, there are no standard staples. Leif Ove Andsnes, one of the most recorded Grieg artists, has set a good example of how to present Grieg’s piano works by selecting individual piano pieces from “Lyriske stykker” (“Lyric Pieces”) opuses 12, 38, 47, 54, 62, 65, 68 that represent 31 years of Grieg’s compositional output. Grieg
scholar and pianist, Einar Steen-Nøkleberg, recorded the complete piano works of Grieg by opuses, including pieces from his earliest to latest compositional periods. These two artists have certainly given us two very different approaches to performing Grieg’s piano pieces.
Download the whole paper here
Paper Cook_Mascarenhas 2015