Classical Music | Piano Music

Recorded on 11/21/2012, uploaded on 08/21/2012

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Edvard Grieg was a master of the miniature, and with the exception of the famous Piano Concerto in A minor, many of his most well-known compositions are shorter works. Among them are the numerous Lyric Pieces for piano, which Grieg produced fairly consistently between 1866 and 1901. The first collection, known as Book I and containing eight pieces, appeared in 1867 as the composer’s opus 12. In 1883, Grieg composed a second set, and from then on produced a new collection of piano miniatures at intervals of two to three years until the tenth and last was published in 1901. By then, there was a total of sixty-six pieces. Each book was an instant success, and contain some of Grieg’s most beloved music.

One of the most well-known miniatures of Grieg’s Lyric Pieces is “Sommerfugl,” the opening piece of Book III, op. 43. Blithe, yet fleeting, as its title suggests, Grieg wonderfully captures the fluttering of butterflies in the sweeping chromatic scales and the frolicking arpeggios that are the central elements of the piece. The lightness of the music is perhaps a nod to Mendelssohn, yet the overall effect looks forward somewhat to the Impressionism of Debussy, like some of Liszt’s later pieces. Two melodic figures—the sweeping chromatic scale, and the dotted-eighth figure underpinned by arpeggios—are the two central ideas of the piece. They alternate and vary until we hear the butterfly momentarily light upon some surface before taking off again in its blissful wanderings.        Joseph DUBose

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One of the sixty-six Lyric Pieces by Edvard Grieg from the Cd album "Voices of the Woods"  (Hal Freedman)