The Gramophone Choice

Peer Gynt (excerpts) – The Bridal March Passes By; Prelude; In the Hall of the Mountain King; Solveig’s Song; Prelude; Arab Dance; Anitra’s Dance; Prelude; Solveig’s Cradle Song. Symphonic Dance, Op 64 – Allegretto grazioso. In Autumn, Op 11. Old Norwegian Romance with Variations, Op 51

Ilse Hollweg sop Beecham Choral Society; Royal Philharmonic Orchestra / Sir Thomas Beecham

EMI Great Recordings of the Century 566914-2 (77' · ADD). Recorded 1957. Buy from Amazon

Grieg’s incidental music was an integral part of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and from this score Grieg later extracted the two familiar suites. This recording of excerpts from Peer Gynt goes back to 1957 but still sounds well and is most stylishly played. Beecham uses Ilse Hollweg to advantage, her voice suggesting the innocence of the virtuous peasant heroine. There’s also an effective use of the choral voices which are almost inevitably omitted in ordinary performances of the two well-known suites: the male chorus of trolls in the ‘Hall of the Mountain King’ are thrilling, and the women in the ‘Arab Dance’ are charming. The other two pieces are well worth having too; Symphonic Dances is a later, freshly pastoral work, while the overture In Autumn is an orchestral second version of an early piece for piano duet. This reissue is further enhanced by the Old Norwegian Romance.

DVD Recommendation

Peer Gynt - a ballet

Christiane Kohl sop Solveig Boguslaw Bidzinski ten Peer Gynt Agnieszka Adamczak, Huiling Zhu sops Angelica Voje mez Chorus, Orchestra and Ballet of the Opera House, Zürich / Eivind Gullberg Jensen

Choreographer Heinz Spoerli Set designer Florian Etti

Video director Andy Sommer

Bel Air Classiques BAC050 (110’ · NTSC · 16:9 · PCM stereo, 5.1 & DTS 5.1 · 0 · s). Includes additonal music by Brett Dean and Mark-Anthony Turnage. Buy from Amazon

Zurich Ballet chief Heinz Spoerli has created a passionately felt ballet from much of Grieg’s score, some of Ibsen’s dialogue (in German) and the borrowing of existing contemporary music. His choice and placing in the sequence of six pieces by Australian composer and ex-Berlin Philharmonic viola player Brett Dean and two by Mark-Anthony Turnage follow the darker, neurotic corners of Ibsen’s play more closely than Grieg did – a kind of filling-in of the traditional incidental music.

The Turnage and Dean works also bring forth a freer, more modern form of dance and, in this choreography, strike more dramatic sparks than the lively but relatively conventional set-pieces sculpted by Spoerli to Grieg’s main numbers. Turnage’s jazzy Scherzoid follows, and intentionally disrupts, the comfortably familiar ‘Morning Mood’ in the Act- 4 desert; it’s used by Spoerli as an ambivalent meeting between newly rich (but always outsider) Peer and his potential Arabian friends or partners. Similar highlights are Dean’s Beggars and Angels and Shadow Music  I. Both provide staging opportunities for the many human and supernatural warnings Ibsen gives of Peer’s demise on his return to Norway.

Spoerli’s decision to double-cast Peer with dancer and actor is effective, as is his fast-rising conductor Eivind Gullberg Jensen’s decisions to remain with a house rather than guest cast for the singing roles, and that all voices, even speaking ones, should come from offstage. Jensen is able to secure from the Zurich Opera orchestra a deft pit-band lightness – and Norwegian-ness – of touch in the Grieg numbers which can elude symphony orchestras in concerts of this material. His Dean and Turnage feel hardly less fluent. Good, representative filming and sound complete a project which, after a comfortable first half, strikes some suitably unsettling resonances in its full treatment of Ibsen’s final two acts.

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