Janina Fialkowska's 2015 release on ATMA Classique is a selection of Edvard Grieg's Lyric Pieces, drawn from the full set of 66 miniatures, which were published between 1867 and 1901. Her choice of the most popular character pieces reflects a common practice among pianists to fit a representative sample on a single disc, necessarily leaving out less familiar numbers along the way. As a result, her CD of 25 tracks is comparable to other highlights albums that typically feature such favorites as the Berceuse, Butterfly, March of the Trolls, Sylph, Wedding Day at Troldhaugen, Evening in the Mountains, and Remembrances. While Fialkowska's long career has yielded many fine recordings of Chopin, Schubert, and Liszt, this sensitive exploration of Grieg is a welcome addition to an impressive catalog that has been focused almost exclusively on the early Romantic period.© TiVo

Chasing the Butterfly is the result of a couple of creative people seeing a confluence of ideas and working to produce something unique and unexpected. Pianist Sigurd Slåttebrekk and producer Tony Harrison worked together on a recording of Grieg's Piano Concerto in 2005. The desire to look at the work as if it were a new piece led them to examine the recordings that Grieg himself had made of some of his Lyric Pieces in 1903 in Paris, the composer performing his own works, which at the time would be considered new (or relatively new) music. The next question was "What would those pieces have sounded like on Grieg's own piano?" Lief Ove Andsnes had already used Grieg's piano at Troldhaugen to record some of the Lyric Pieces. What Slåttebrekk and Harrison decided to do was attempt to re-create Grieg's recordings, to capture the music as Grieg would have played it in his own home, in 21st century sound, meaning not just using the same pieces, but also trying to replicate the same tempos, dynamics, and shadings. Slåttebrekk realized that merely listening to Grieg play and then precisely imitating him would not do. He tried to absorb the way Grieg played, the way he handled different types of passages and sounds, to create performances that sound natural and musical. Slåttebrekk succeeds in this, as can be heard in the full Sonata, Op. 7. Grieg was only able to record half of the last movement, but Slåttebrekk gives us the complete work, sounding very fresh and organic. The same is true of the Ballade, Op. 24. There is a brightness and momentum in his playing that makes it come alive. In the Andante moderato movement he uses sensitive phasing and rubato, but not so much that the sense of direction is ever lost. To prove how closely Slåttebrekk comes to Grieg's original, the Grieg recordings are also included, as is a track Harrison put together of the Wedding Day at Troldhaugen that weaves Grieg's and Slåttebrekk's performances. The second disc contains the Piano Concerto recording with Michail Jurowski and the Oslo Philharmonic that started it all. It has some of the same sparkle as the solo pieces and is not treated as monumentally heavy or forcefully as most pianists do. This distinctive release -- something of a twist on period performance practice -- is recommended for any fan of Grieg's music. © TiVo

Was so lovely a recording of such sweet-souled music expected from modernist virtuoso Leif Ove Andsnes? Was it expected that the sharp-cornered and hard-edged Andsnes -- the player whose Schumann is tart, whose Brahms is bitter, whose Chopin is cruel -- could have played Grieg's delightful and delectable Lyric Pieces with such beauty of tone, gentleness of touch, suppleness of phrasing, and such deep and abiding affection? Sure. Andsnes has recorded works of Grieg before, notably on a splendid disc of Lyric Pieces for Virgin, and this EMI recording of more Lyric Pieces is cut from the same soft, silken cloth. But as splendid as that disc was, this one is even better. Not only has Andsnes matured as a player -- listen to his restraint even in such showstoppers as March of the Trolls -- but he is playing Grieg's piano in Grieg's living room in his home at Troldhaugen. In other words, he is playing the instrument upon which these pieces were written played in the room in which they were written. Grieg's Steinway is a mellow-toned instrument with a singing middle range and a ringing upper register, and it perfectly suits his music. As do Andsnes' performances. From the early delicate Arietta (1867) through the sensuous Notturno (1883) and the aching Homesickness (1893) to the shimmering Evening in the Mountains (1898), Andsnes seems in complete sympathy with Grieg's exquisite miniatures. And when Grieg does ask for virtuoso technique as in the rapturously joyous Wedding Day at Troldhaugen, Andsnes, the model of a modernist virtuoso, tears through it with ecstatic abandon.© TiVo

Piano Classics presents the first volume in a major new series which promises to become the most comprehensive recorded survey of a central but now little-known figure in 19th-century Italian music. Born in Rome in 1841, Giovanni Sgambati cut an impressive but relatively familiar figure as a prodigious young virtuoso until, as a 21-year-old keyboard lion in the making, he was introduced to Franz Liszt. The encounter changed Sgambati’s life. Liszt, perhaps the single most influential figure in European musical life in the middle of the 19th century, took the young Sgambati under his wing, and his faith was richly repaid. Still in his 20s, Sgambati conducted the Italian premiere of the Dante Symphony and even the premiere of the first (lengthy) part of the Christus oratorio. There is an irony that the single piece through which his name has travelled worldwide is a piano Melodie, a sensuously achieved transcription of the Dance of the Blessed Spirits from Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice. Guaranteed to hush a rapturous audience into silence, it became the much-loved encore piece for the late Nelson Freire, among others. Too little of Sgambati’s music for his own instrument is known beyond the Melodie. This neglect is being redressed in style by the Italian pianist Gaia Federica Caporiccio, born in Florence in 1988. The first volume of a projected complete series of Sgambati’s piano works proceeds in mostly chronological fashion. Thus the curtain is drawn back with a flourish in the Gothic, Bachian arpeggios of the Prelude and Fugue Op. 6. The two Etudes de concert Op. 10 already show Sgambati’s gift for sketching a tone-painting while focusing on a particular piece of technique. While Sgambati made considerable use of patterned keyboard figurations to seize an audience’s imagination, he was scarcely less adept than Schumann or Chopin at outlining a mood and then drawing a veil over it. Thus there are no sonatas or even long-form ballades here, but a series of evocative impromptus, lyric pieces and nocturnes, each of them memorable in their own right, adding up to an absorbing portrait of a young pianist-composer with Romantic-era Europe at his feet. © Piano Classics

Having completed his studies at the Brussels Conservatoire and won first prizes at several distinguished competitions for young musicians, Matthieu Idmtal quickly became known as a specialist in the music of Alexander Scriabin. His debut on record was dedicated to a sequence of the Russian composer’s Etudes and Preludes, and it won him golden reviews: "I have listened to Sofronitsky, Gilels, Richter and Ashkenazy – great Scriabin players all. Young Matthieu Idmtal has the potential to join that lofty group". (American Record Guide) His Scriabin recital was followed by an equally well-received album of the Violin Sonatas by Edvard Grieg, in company with his regular violin-recital partner Maya Levy. The natural sequel is this focus on the Norwegian composer’s solo output. Grieg composed seven books of Lyric Pieces across the course of his career: songs without words that amount to a diary of his compositional evolution as well as testament to enduring preoccupations such as the artistic transformation of folksong and the evocation of natural phenomena such as sunlight and the movement of water. Idmtal’s sequence ranges across all seven books, and does not shy away from established classics such as the Arietta and Wedding Day at Troldhaugen. However, he also includes several lesser-known and introspective masterpieces such as the Vanished Days and Homesickness from the Opus 57 set. Even by their side, however, the Piano Sonata, Op. 7 is an almost forgotten masterpiece. Grieg wrote it at the age of 22, recently graduated from the conservatoire in Leipzig, yet even within the first movement’s opening exposition there are shapes and harmonies that instantly identify the composer’s artistic fingerprint. This Sonata reflects the ambitions and character of the young Grieg: high-spirited, virtuosic, impetuous, and permeated with brusque mood swings. Cast in a compressed version of the traditional four-movement form, it encompasses many changes of mood, sometimes very abrupt, as if the composer was overflowing with musical ideas and inspiration. It makes an ideal introduction to the familiar world of the Lyric Pieces as well as a notable debut for Matthieu Idmtal on Piano Classics. © Piano Classics

If Chopin "invented" the Mazurka, then surely by the same token Grieg "invented" the Lyric Piece. Over his lifetime he published ten volumes of Lyric Pieces, containing sixty-six individual works. Born in Bergen, Grieg studied in Leipzig and became established as Norway’s leading composer, successfully synthesising Norwegian folk music with the forms and conventions of the German tradition. While he was internationally acclaimed for his Piano Concerto and the incidental music to Peer Gynt, the vast majority of his output lies not in large-scale works, but in smaller, more intimate forms, especially songs and, of course, his Lyric Pieces. Peter Donohoe writes: "as a teenager I expanded my knowledge of the music of Grieg to include many solo piano pieces as well as the better-known orchestral works. I was beguiled by his style, and the reason remains somewhat intangible. Although one is able to identify the originality of Grieg as a composer – the Norwegian folk element in his music, his natural gift for memorable melodic lines, his occasional diversions into unique and extraordinarily forward-looking harmonies, and, to some degree, his emotional naïveté – there is a unique, unidentifiable kernel in his output that defies analysis, as is true of the work of all the great composers... All these works are pristine examples of his diverse and original style – Norwegian with a Germanic flavour – and it has been a huge and satisfying pleasure to return to them to create this and future recordings". © Chandos

Russian pianist Katya Apekisheva is a veteran of the festival and competition circuit; Grieg Piano Music is her second CD for the English label Quartz and her first for the company as soloist. The selection is well chosen, containing Grieg's piano solo version of Holberg Suite, the Poetic Tone-Pictures, and a dozen pieces drawn from the Lyric Suites that form a good representation of that series as a whole, containing many of the best-known works therein. Apekisheva is an ideal competition-grade pianist; she gets all of the notes in where they belong, follows tempi with care, and transmits what's on the page in a literal, not a figurative, sense. As such, these recordings would be excellent for student pianists trying to learn the ropes in this literature. However, from a purely listening standpoint, this is also Apekisheva's greatest drawback. Grieg's music needs to sing, to breathe; while virtuosic elements in the music come off with precision here, slower, less difficult melodic passages are quiet, pristine, and rather lacking in poetry. One hopes for the personality of the pianist to raise Grieg's music to the realm of the exalted; the expected and score-faithful just isn't enough as Grieg cannot be eaten cold. Quartz's recording is at its best in loud passages, where the weight and power of Apekisheva's grand rings out in full display; otherwise the short reverb in the room, combined with the digital sound, adds a metallic sheen to the sound of the piano that's less than unattractive, but not to the point where its consistently bothersome. © TiVo