Hakon Austbo - Grieg: Complete Piano Works [CD]

Hakon Austbo's highly regarded Grieg collection, reissued with a recent recording of the four-hands repertoire to make the most complete available set of the composer's piano music - and, by extension, an open window on to the soul of this most poetic of Scandinavian romantics.Edvard Grieg was a talented child pianist when the violinist Ole Bull heard him play, and straightaway recognised in him a talent deserving of nurture. While he went on to write a symphony and a few other large-scale works, Grieg found his voice most of all through the piano, and through the songs without words which he called Lyric Pieces. In themselves, these are extensions of the Schumann/Mendelssohn lineage of instrumental tone-pictures, as well as translations of the lyric impulse that made him an equally successful song-writer, especially once he had married his cousin, Nina, and found in her the singer who understood both him and his music best. Nina also played the piano well enough to form a duo partnership with her husband. In that context we may understand the transcriptions of his orchestral Holberg and Peer Gynt suites as not merely financially expedient hackwork, done to exploit the domestic market for enjoying orchestral classics at home, but as an intimate act of devotion. In the gently tripping neobaroque dances of the Holberg Suite, as brought to life by two pianists sitting side by side, we can eavesdrop on a touching communion. Meanwhile, the ten books of Lyric Pieces came to form a kind of diary to which Grieg returned and confided some of his most intimate and experimental thoughts through the course of his entire career. Whether evoking nature or a solitary thought or a lover's gaze, the Lyric Pieces go straight to the heart of the matter, and often with a disarming simplicity of manner which conceals some sophistication of form and technique. Awarding Hakon Austbo's cycle 10/10 for both performance and engineering, Jed Distler at Classics Today remarked: 'Austbo's performances are consistently direct, idiomatic, and as natural as breathing... his virile and dynamically charged traversal matches Grieg's pianism in spirit... You won't find a better Grieg piano music bargain anywhere on the planet.'