I often wonder if Mr. Grieg didn’t have an instrumental role in getting me to stay in Norway. His music thrills me and I hear it as vividly as anything I can see with my eyes.

 

This piece is not very well known, I believe, and it was my brother Luke who introduced it to me because we tried to play it together once when he visited Norway.

 

We will soon attempt it again. I have been practicing it as much as I can, but can’t yet equal the quality I hear on the version I purchased from iTunes.

 

As I was listening just now, but to the Concerto in A Minor, I realized for the first time that there are often two voices in Grieg’s music that bring to mind two birds careering around each other in an aerial dance.

 

Imagine seeing those birds, one after the other, suddenly ascending and turning, then dropping, then up again, round and round, one moving and the other reacting, spinning over a mirror fjord reflecting apple blossoms, in the midst of a blinding soft green, occasionally shedding drops of water mirroring the world and the apple blossoms in perfect clarity - if you can freeze frame them in your mind’s eye - while high above the snow gleams and feeds wispy, stringy white waterfalls, which, up close crash down, but from a distance merely caress and moisten the sheer gray mountain sides, smudged by purples and yellows among the green, with their mist.

 

That’s one of the things I hear/see when I listen to Grieg.