Grieg: Olav Trygvason
Soloists
Malmö Symphony Orchestra
Bjarte Engeset
This was fascinating. I had heard of the work but thought that it was incidental music to a play, but in fact it is the torso of an incomplete opera - there are 3 scenes lasting a total of about 30 minutes. Any thoughts that Grieg was just a composer of Bon Bons and trifles was swept away right from the beginning. This was extremely forceful dramatic music that made a real impact. I shouldn’t have been that surprised - last year I listened to the whole of the music from Peer Gynt and was struck by how much more there was to it that the familiar suite - lovely as that is. I didn’t’ detect anything particularly nationalistic in the first two scenes - there were good examples of Grieg being fully absorbed in the central operatic traditions of his time, but the third scene was very different. Here we immediately entered the world of Grieg’s Norwegian Dances and the folk tradition of Scandinavia. This was delightful music though very different in character to the first two scenes. It would have been interesting to see how it would all have fitted together and Grieg completed the opera. But he and his librettist had very different views on how to proceed. They fell out and the project was not more. That’s a great pity because there is so much of interest in what was written and the history of opera in Scandinavia might have been quite different had the opera been completed and established Grieg on the international opera stage.
