Classical Music | Violin Music

Recorded on 12/21/2011, uploaded on 04/26/2012

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Edvard Grieg is primarily known as a composer of miniatures. With the exception of a modest number of large-scale works, these smaller forms dominated his output. Yet, this was not the result of any lack of skill, but apparently only of personal choice. Among Grieg’s multi-movement works are three violin sonatas that were composed between 1865 and 1887. The first sonata was a particularly youthful work and today is seldom heard. On the other hand, the second, which Grieg’s teacher Niels Gade complained of being “too Norwegian,” is somewhat more well-known. The Violin Sonata No. 3, however, was the only one to achieve lasting success, and has found a permanent place in the standard repertoire of the instrument.

Composed at Grieg’s lakeside home, Troldhaugen, during the summer of 1886, the Violin Sonata No. 3, unlike its companions, occupied Grieg for a significantly longer time, and was not completed until January of the following year. Grieg dedicated the work to the painter Franz von Lehnbach. Its premiere came in December 1887 in Leipzig with Grieg himself at the piano accompanying the noted Russian violinist Adolf Brodsky. In the traditional three-movement pattern, the sonata opens with a turbulent sonata form movement, juxtaposing an agitated first theme in C minor against a lyrical tune in the relative major. The middle movement, marked “alla Romanza,” in contrast opens with a delicate and charming E major melody for the piano that is in turn picked up by the violin. Framed by this warm and serene music is a quick and nimble central episode in the key of the tonic minor. Lastly, the animated finale opens with mysterious open fifths and a theme that propels the movement forward with an indomitable energy. Another sonata form, a lengthy second theme in A-flat contrasts the fiery principal melody, but the movement lacks a real development section. This secondary theme returns as the music modulates into C major, and which then preludes the exuberant coda that brings the sonata to a triumphant close.        Joseph DuBose

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Sonata for Violin and Piano in c minor, Op. 45     Edvard Grieg

I.     Allegro molto ed appassionato
II.    Allegretto espressivo alla Romanza
III.   Allegro animato

Edvard Grieg (1843-1907) was born and raised in Bergen, Norway. He studied at the Leipzig Conservatory, and later lived in Copenhagen andOslo (then called Christiania). He is not only Norway’s most famous composer, but a distinctively Norwegian composer. Owing to long periods of dependence and subjection first to Denmark and then to Sweden, Grieg was born into a Norway struggling to maintain its national identity. As a young man, Grieg set out to rectify this situation by giving Norway a repertoire of music grounded in the themes and timbres of traditional Norwegian folk-music and yet sophisticated enough to merit performance in the best concert halls of Europe.

Grieg’s corpus includes three violin sonatas whose renown varies inversely with the order of their composition: the third is firmly ensconced in the standard violin repertoire, having been performed and recorded by virtually every great violinist; the second is moderately well-known, and is performed occasionally; the first is virtually unknown.

Grieg finished the third sonata in January of 1887 and he joined violinist Adolf Brodsky in its premiere at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig in December that year. That was highly successful and the Sonata quickly became a popular favorite in Europe. Grieg was sometimes stereotyped as a miniaturist and folklorist, ill-suited to abstraction and the standard classical forms, but this sonata is a large-scale work, and bold in its treatment of sonata form in the two outer movements. The first movement is a marvel of concentrated themes, relentlessly contrasted and juxtaposed. The central Romanza is A-B-A form, with a serenely lyrical, quasi-folk song in E major wrapped around a fast, brittle dance in E minor. The finale is also a crisp dance in the main, but with an urgent and mysterious development section and a triumphant apotheosis (coda) in C major.       Gregory Maytan

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.