Classical Composer: | Grieg, Edvard |
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Work: | Fra Holbergs tid (From Holberg's Time), Op. 40 (version for string orchestra) |
Year Composed: | 1885 |
Instrumentation: | str(8 7 6 5 4) |
Publishers: |
C.F. Peters Frankfurt Edwin F. Kalmus The Edwin A. Fleisher Music Collection C.F. Peters Corporation C.F. Peters Leipzig |
Duration: | 00:21:00 |
Period: | Romantic |
Work Category: | Orchestral |
Work Information
Available Recording(s)
Originally written for piano during the summer of 1884, Grieg's From Holberg's Time: Suite in the Olden Style was commissioned to mark the bicentenary of his birth. An early example of pastiche, of romantic neo-classicism, its five movements, tonally all in G, consciously parody the clavéciniste style and Bachian dance - suite forms of Holberg's century. Its composer's personality, nevertheless, remains immutable. As his biographer David Monrad-Johansen says (1934), assuming "the garments of the rococo period", he "simply placed himself in the same milieu in which the great satirist lived and worked. He looks at the present through the spectacles of the past". The string arrangement - a repertory standard, idiomatic, richly focused and as brilliant for its massed glories as its testing solos (the closing Rigaudon, for instance, so-called "graveyard of orchestral leaders") - was made by Grieg in 1885.
Writer: Bjarte Engeset Siegert
Translated by: David Gallagher
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