★★★★☆

Grieg marked the score of his G Minor Symphony (composed when he was 20 in 1863), “Must never be performed”. This was honoured for 113 years (though individual movements were performed in the 1860s) but after much discussion, it was played in Bergen in 1981 and recorded by Decca under Karsten Andersen. 

It’s hard to understand Grieg’s attitude, as, for an apprentice work, it’s rather good. Certainly, it has the generic Romantic rhetoric, the stuttering Schumannesque syncopations in the first movement for instance, but it’s also thematically interesting and full of ideas, proving that, even this young, Grieg could think effectively in symphonic paragraphs. The Adagio is especially winsome. Grieg regarded the work as “insufficiently Norwegian”, whatever that means, but the scherzo-like third movement sounded very ‘Norwegian’ to me. 

I’ve raved about Eivind Aadland’s recordings with the excellent West Deutsche Rundfunk Orchestra in his Grieg cycle and this vivid performance and lovely recording maintain the standard. The soloist in the Piano Concerto is Rumanian-born Herbert Schuch, whose debut disc caused quite a stir a few years ago. Here, his reading is alive to every nuance of what is, for better or worse, a warhorse. One review exclaimed “his shadings have shadings” – exactly! His tone is gorgeous and so is this CD.


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