Quartet for String Orchestra in G Minor by Edvard Grieg | Concert Library

Quartet for String Orchestra in G Minor

Edvard Grieg was the first great Scandinavian composer. His studies in Leipzig grounded him in the Germanic tradition, but upon his return to his native Norway, he delved into local folk music and launched a national music academy. In 1876, he completed a collaboration with Norway’s most celebrated writer, Henrik Ibsen, providing incidental music for the play Peer Gynt which remains his most recognizable calling card. That same year, Grieg wrote a series of song settings on poems by Ibsen, including the song “Spillemaend” about a water spirit from Norwegian folklore.

That song melody became the basis of a string quartet that Grieg began the next year while staying among the fjords and forests of Norway’s gorgeous Hardanger district. During a sojourn that ended up lasting through the winter and on to the next summer, Grieg wrote the Quartet in G Minor, his first foray into that genre since a lost student work he attempted at 18.

As he wrote in a letter to a friend, his intention in the quartet was to strive toward “breadth, vigor, flight of imagination, and, above all, fullness of tone for the instruments for which it is written.” That fullness is on display in the opening introduction, powered by double-stops — drawing the bow across two strings simultaneously — and fat chords of three or four notes. (It suits this quartet’s character quite well to play with string sections instead of individual instruments, as in this performance.) The song theme appears in the introduction, and, after an agitated main theme to begin the fast body of the movement, a variant of the song melody serves as the contrasting second theme.

The slow movement takes the form of a Romanze, implying music of a songlike character, but that genial calm in the outer sections gets disturbed by another descent into minor-key angst in a central episode. The third movement is an Intermezzo full of stout declamations and themes that again relate to the song melody from the start of the quartet. To complete this work’s cyclical journey, the finale begins with a slow introduction on a related motif, and it brings back the slow tempo just before the end. In between is a fiery romp based on the saltarello, an Italian folk dance style full of vigorous leaps.

June 9–11, 2023

Steven Copies in Grieg Quartet for String Orchestra in G Minor

Watch Performance
35:18

Director: Joshua Wyatt
Associate Director: Rebecca Beam
Cameras: Kailyn Grider
Video Technical Director: JoAnn Babic
Video Score Reader: Jeffrey Stirling
Audio: Cameron Wiley, YourClassical MPR
Executive Producer for Digital Media: Matt Thueson
Assistant Producer for Digital Projects: Erica Beebe
Assistant Producer for Audience Engagement: Senia Swanson

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