Grieg: Complete Orchestral Works

This boxed set of Grieg’s complete orchestral works is a celebration of the composer’s rich and multi-faceted aesthetic. Grieg was an idealistic humanist whose music and writings underlined a harmony between humans and nature. The sense of nostalgia and ‘postcard lyricism’ often associated with him belies the wild energy also present in his music – its primeval force, pessimistic emotions and tempestuous Romanticism. Thanks to Bjarte Engeset’s carefully researched and widely admired performances, Grieg’s complex musical universe can here be appreciated in full.

"The symphony performance under Eivind Aadland has everything you would hope for: lots of energy and excitement, with a very fine, well-prepared orchestra." (American Record Guide) The complete edition of Edvard Grieg's symphonic works with the WDR Symphony Orchestra under Eivind Aadland is now available as a set. This edition is especially convincing thanks to the authentic approach of the Norwegian Eivind Aadland. Vol. 1 and 2 are dedicated to the original orchestral works, whilst Vol. 3 contains a portion of the transcriptions of works that Grieg had originally composed for the piano.

"Between 1980 and his death in 1989, Herbert von Karajan recorded the incredible amount of 78 CDs worth of orchestral and choral music for DGG. In the final decade of his creative life, he made quintessential recordings of major works he had not recorded before: Nielsen’s Symphony No. 4 “The Inextinguishable” and Saint-Saëns’ “Organ” Symphony. Among the highpoints of Karajan’s late years is the major part of his collaboration with Anne-Sophie Mutter, the “wunderkind” Karajan discovered in the late 1970s and mentored throughout the 1980s.

This is a collection of absolute gems. The one-movement Concerto by Fauré is the only movement to have survived from an original three-movement violin concerto, and Saint-Saëns’s Morceau de concert was originally intended as the first movement of his third violin concerto. Lalo’s Fantaisie norvégienne, with its utterly gorgeous slow movement, was to become the inspiration behind Bruch’s Scottish Fantaisie, and Guitare is an early encore piece for violin and piano (later orchestrated by Gabriel Pierné) that Lalo (himself a violinist) wrote for his own use. Guiraud, who taught composition to both Debussy and Dukas, wrote the haunting Caprice for Sarasate, and the Poème by Canteloube shows much of the charm he is now so famed for through his Chants d’Auvergne.