Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique & Leif Ove Andsnes

Grieg in his own time.

Leif Ove Andsnes joins one of the world’s great period instrument orchestras for Edvard Grieg and César Franck as you’ve never heard them before.

No composer is more associated with Bergen than Edvard Grieg, and no pianist is more associated with Grieg than Leif Ove Andsnes. At this landmark concert, the Orchestra Révolutionnaire et Romantique under its conductor Dinis Sousa will perform Grieg with a difference: on instruments from the composer’s own time. Andsnes himself will play a Steinway piano from 1881 transported specially from Belgium.

Grieg on period-specific instruments sounds entirely different: fresh, energetic and cleansed of accumulated nostalgia and historical baggage. This concert presents a unique opportunity to hear music by the composer, and his contemporary César Franck, as if cleaned and restored.

Grieg’s celebrated piano concerto is his most popular work – a piece that injected the freshness of the composer’s Norway-inspired aesthetic into the framework of the European Romantic piano concerto.

The composer’s Symphony in C minor, however, is shrouded in suppression and mystery. The composer was 20 years old when he wrote the piece but subsequently decreed that it ‘must never be performed’, believing it owed too heavy a debt to Schumann and Mendelssohn. It wasn’t until 1980 that the Symphony was first performed, at the Bergen International Festival. This performance, on the kind of instruments Grieg was writing for, will constitute a second re-birth for the work – a rich, coherent piece in which the green shoots of Grieg’s folk-inspired personal style start to appear.

Andsnes, Sousa and the Orchestra Révolutionnaire et Romantique also present music by Grieg’s Belgian contemporary César Franck. Whether or not the two composers knew each other, they knew of each other. In 1885, Franck completed his opera Hulda, set in Norway and based on a play by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson.

Like Grieg, Franck believed in directness of musical expression and strength of form. His music is beguiling as much for its pert melodies and lucid emotions as for its clear processes. The composer’s Symphonic Variations for piano and orchestra takes a single melody on a journey through drama and joyousness to ultimate triumph. As soloist on the same 1881 Steinway piano, Andsnes is even more likely to draw parallels between the two composers in an illuminating and captivating time-travelling concert.

Photo: Ondine Bertrand.