This first ever bargain release of all Grieg’s music for Ibsen’s harrowing drama of self-discovery must tempt a wider audience to hear what is, alongside Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and Bizet’s L’Arlésienne, one of the 19th-century’s finest theatre scores – and undoubtedly the composer’s masterpiece in large-scale form. As conductor Bjarte Engeset points out in a detailed note, “the text forced Grieg to produce sounds, and indeed a whole aesthetic, that point far forward in time towards what would later be called impressionism, primitivism and modernism”. And nowhere more so than in the two melodramas which those who only know this music from the Suites never get to hear – Act 2’s “Peer Gynt and the Bøyg” and Act 5’s Night Scene. Here, over a series of ghostly pedal points and wind chords somewhere between Weber and Stravinsky, Peer wrestles with his conscience voiced by unseen spirits and objects.

Engeset and his Swedish players and Norwegian actors and singers provide the most sensible mix of spoken word and music yet arrived at for home listening and have more fun with this music in the studio than anyone since Masur or Beecham. Try Itziar Galdos’s cheeky Anitra, spry in both dialogue and song with an infectious laugh, or the brilliant idea to cast the Herd Girls (Grieg’s very own Rhinedaughtersteasing- Alberich scene) with folk rather than concert singers. Actors Hans Jakob Sand (Peer) and Erik Hijvu (pretty much every other male including the Mountain King) are not only richly delivered characters but integrate the play seamlessly with the music-making. Such sheer theatricality outpoints the pioneering Neeme Järvi set (DG, 8/05) and the more recent Bergen performance (BIS, A/05). Naxos’s website provides good texts and translations. Indeed, with a bonus of nigh on half an hour of superior Grieg Bjørnson settings, the new release leapfrogs all competition except, perhaps, the Guillaume Tourniaire (Aeon, A/05), neither version of which, however, is in Norwegian.