Grieg's Lyric pieces belong in a tradition of short pianistic essays and tone-poems, of which famous earlier examples include Beethoven's Bagatelles, Schubert's Moments musicaux, Mendelssohn's Songs without words and Schumann's Kinderszenen. There are nearly 70 in all and they are brimful of imagination and poetry as well as beautifully written for the piano. The first thing to say about Peter Katin's playing of the three last books is that it is fully idiomatic, and one hears at once that this is a pianist who loves and believes in the music. He plays the pieces as concert music and doesn't scale them down to a cosy drawing-room level, yet rightly their essential intimacy and directness remain and there's no empty rhetoric.
By no means are all these pieces miniatures: although only three of the 19 here last longer than five minutes, their style is often bigger than that suggests; for example, the first piece in Book 8, ''From years of youth'' (''Fra ungdomsdagene''), has a heroic element as well as a pastoral-nostalgic one. They are mainly less familiar works than some of those from the earlier books though the popular ''Wedding day at Troldhaugen'' (''Bryllupsdag pa Troldhaugen'') is here, as is ''Puck'' (''Smatrold''), but that very unfamiliarity means that new delights are always around the corner. We realize, too, that Grieg's musical language had not stood still in the three decades between his youthful Piano Concerto and this music—listen, for a start, to the strangely brooding B minor piece called ''Melancholy'' (''Tungsind'') from Book 8 which, although recognizably his, is not far away from the late Liszt of La lugubre gondola. The variety and quality of the music and playing makes this disc very attractive, and there are some magically 'inward' performances, not least that of ''At your feet'' (''For dine fodder'') and ''The wood's peace'' (''Skovstilhed'') in Books 9 and 10 respectively.
The recording is natural and places the piano in a good perspective. Katin's own perceptive booklet note is on the Lyric pieces as a whole, and I find this very useful while recognizing that some collectors might prefer one that discussed in turn each of the pieces played here. In the alternative account of this music played by Eva Knardahl in 1977 on BIS/Conifer, neither the performance nor the thick piano sound present real competition for the new Katin disc, which represents excellent value at medium price.'