Edvard Grieg Kor sings Grieg
Grieg: Four Psalms; Ave Maris Stella; Holberg Suite (arr. Robinson); Ole Bull: Saeterjentens Søndag; David Lang: Last Spring
Auden Iversen (baritone); Edvard Grieg Kor/håkon Matti Skrede Chandos CHSA 5232 (hybrid CD/SACD) 64:02 mins
Alas: it was all going so well in a mostly crepuscular sort of way for the Edvard Grieg Choir until they decided to Swingleise the celebrated Holberg Suite with the aid of experienced arranger
Paul Robinson. You need the kind of instrumental purity the Swingles can fine-tune, and perfect pitch,
too; with a soprano vibrato that’s fine on the other tracks, and some fast music that just doesn’t work for voices, this seems doomed to fail. Some may like it; I could hardy sit through it.
Which is a shame, because the group plus two more per part and baritone Audun Iversen puts many in its debt by introducing us to Grieg’s fine last work, the
Four Psalms of 1906. There are some gorgeous harmonies here, with an almost Delian chromaticdescending flavour at the heart of the otherwise jaunty No. 2, and an exultant final setting of the word
‘fri’ (free) at its end which confirms what Grieg Museum Curator Sigurd Sandmo writes about the composer’s disdain for the stuffy Norwegian religious establishment. The folk song vein may be harder to detect here, though, than in the lovely arrangement by Paul Robinson of a traditional Norwegian lament, which found echoes in the song of Peer Gynt ’s ‘Solveig’. There’s a bewitching calm about the choral arrangement, with added words, of violinist-composer Ole Bull’s The Herd-girl’s Sunday, well known in Norway, and the melancholy refrains of David Lang’s Last Spring, minimal alongside Grieg’s famous melodic lines for the poem. That still leaves 44 minutes out of 64 worth investigating.
David Nice
PERFORMANCE ★★★
RECORDING ★★★★