How I found Grieg up a mountain
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 28/02/2008
Pianist Leif Ove Andsnes explains to Geoffrey Norris the lengths - and heights - he went to in pursuit of his hero
When was the last time you saw someone playing a grand piano thousands of feet up a mountain? A cynic might dismiss it as some sort of gimmick, but this is Leif Ove Andsnes we are talking about, one of today's most compelling, deep-thinking musicians and the least publicity-hungry person you could imagine.
His high-altitude performance, with the piano perched perilously above a snowy abyss, provides the visual climax to a fascinating documentary DVD in which Andsnes traverses Europe delving into the often misunderstood personality of a composer with whom he has long been linked.
As a Norwegian, Andsnes first made his mark here in the piano concerto by his fellow countryman Edvard Grieg. That was almost two decades ago, since when his discerning interpretations across a broad range of music, from Haydn and Mozart to Schubert, Chopin and Brahms and on to Rachmaninov, Janácek and Szymanowski have earned him a lustrous reputation worldwide.
He is now in the happy position of being able more or less to dictate what he plays, preferring to concentrate on specific areas of repertoire for a certain period before moving on to another one. It was in this way that he came back to Grieg.
Grieg was always a popular composer, as much in his own lifetime as now. The early triumph of the piano concerto, written when he was in his mid-twenties, triggered international fame, as did his first book of Lyric Pieces Op 12 for solo piano. This is the familiar face of Grieg, tuneful, charming, uncomplicated, exquisitely crafted.
advertisementAndsnes maintains that "the first book of Lyric Pieces was so successful that there was pressure on him to compose that kind of thing, which is why he went on to write nine more books of them. It was easy for him." And it was something that sparked the notorious, stinging criticism from Debussy that Grieg's music was like "pink sweets filled with snow".
But this tells only part of the story. The real crux of Andsnes's DVD, and of the solo recital he is giving at London's Festival Hall next month, is a rarely-heard piece that speaks powerfully and troublingly of internal conflict, with an intensity of emotion far removed from Grieg's genial façade. This is the Ballade in G minor Op 24, written in 1875-76 when he was in his early thirties. Whether because of the turbulent feelings it embodies or because of its sheer physical demands, Grieg never played it himself in public.
"I always had problems with it," says Andsnes.
"It has a very special place in Grieg's output and his life, because he was in a period of depression when he composed it. Shortly before writing the Ballade, both his parents had died, and you can hear that struggle in it, that stagnation and resignation."
Panning out from that time of grief, it is tempting to hear the Ballade as a manifestation of contradictions in Grieg's character, which, for the most part, remained hidden.
"He could be incredibly self-centred," explains Andsnes, "but he was very generous with his friends. As a composer, he is seen as a conservative figure, but he said late in life that he was afraid he was not keeping up with what younger people were doing. He was a man of tremendous melancholy, but also with a tendency to be angry and impetuous."
In Norway Grieg was, and is, a national icon. However, while he welcomed Norway's independence from Sweden in 1905, he disliked the country's insularity, lampooning Norwegian rigidity, it is said, in his dry depiction of the trolls in his incidental music to Ibsen's Peer Gynt.
His own musical education was central European, specifically in Leipzig, and we are perhaps wrong to view his music as typically Norwegian. "Of course," says Andsnes, "he used dances and folk tunes to spice his language, but the imagination and the harmonies are essentially his own.
"Working with the Ballade, I sometimes think it's a little sad that he didn't manage to do something similar more often. What was it that was so difficult for him? He tried to write a second piano concerto, but couldn't. There were long periods when he couldn't write a note."
Grieg died in 1907 aged 64, and Andsnes detects "a conflict in his last 20 years of being so popular internationally while not being able to provide much that was new".
But, returning to the mountain top, one feature the Ballade shares with Norway is its expansive horizons. In both, as Andsnes says, "there's so much beauty and space".
Andsnes plays at the Festival Hall on March 10; tickets 0871 663 2509. Ballad for Edvard Grieg is available on DVD (EMI 5 12128 9) and CD (EMI 3 94399 2)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jh ... ieg128.xml
I had to post this, as I'm going to Norway in May. Also, decades ago my father played the lead in Song of Norway, a musical based on Grieg's life.
