Hakon Austbo – Grieg: Complete Piano Works

Hakon Austbo’s highly regarded Grieg collection, reissued with a recent recording of the four-hands repertoire to make the most complete available set of the composer’s piano music – and, by extension, an open window on to the soul of this most poetic of Scandinavian romantics.Edvard Grieg was a talented child pianist when the violinist Ole Bull heard him play, and straightaway recognised in him a talent deserving of nurture. While he went on to write a symphony and a few other large-scale works, Grieg found his voice most of all through the piano, and through the songs without words which he called Lyric Pieces. In themselves, these are extensions of the Schumann/Mendelssohn lineage of instrumental tone-pictures, as well as translations of the lyric impulse that made him an equally successful song-writer, especially once he had married his cousin, Nina, and found in her the singer who understood both him and his music best. Nina also played the piano