Grieg - Peer Gynt Suites [Ormandy-Philadelphia Orchestra]I'm again impressed by these fairly short vignettes of Peer Gynt, incidental music for Ibsen's play, nice little atmospheric 'sound stories', i played this work last year [18th July 2010], and was mightily impressed by it then, getting away from the two most famous pieces of the suites [2 And 4 from the first set], i find that there's a depth to some of the other pieces, it really is wonderful music.
Eugene Ormandy was born in Hungary in 1899, and died in 1985 in America, he moved there in his early twenties, he made this recording between 1972-1975, the front cover is tremendous, these RCA Classical Navigator series each show a map on the front, some are fairly poor, some are very good, but i believe this is the very best one of all [by Johann Kutscheit], a really sharp and detailed drawing of Scandinavia, colourful coastal / border lines, and clever latitude and longitude lines, also with beautiful contour lines for the mountains of Norway, and the sea shadings give depth and variety too, a really classy front cover.
Well it's usually the two famous pieces that catch my attention, numbers 1 & 4 of the First Suite, but on this listen i was taken aback by the first number of the Second Suite, 'Ingrid's Lament', it starts off in a distress on frantic violins, but soon develops into the lament [0:22+], a dark string dirge on lower strings [0:22-1:39], it's when the higher violins come in [1:39-2:58] that i can feel the weeping, and amazingly it sounds like a phrase lifted from Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, second movement, but for me the real magic is when the timpani comes in, and hammers out the heartbeats [2:53-3:54], sounds almost like dying, as the heartbeats quieten down, but right at the end they hammer out in two major outbursts [3:54 & 4:07], a really clever mini tone poem from Grieg.
Here's Ingrid's Lament being played on YouTube.
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