Edvard Grieg Sonata for Piano E Minor Op 7 (1865, Rev 1887)

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Early on in his career, before discovering his talents for miniatures, songs, and incidental music, Edvard Grieg tried his hand at more traditional concert music in its then-rigidly codified styles and forms. Indeed, the list of Grieg's almost entirely unplayed early compositions reads like a text of essential concert music varieties: a symphony, some chamber sonatas, an abandoned string quartet, a piano concerto. The first of all these standard concert works to be completed was the Sonata for piano in E minor, Op. 7 (1865, revised 1887), a work so obscure that one can dig through book after book without catching a single reference to it and plunder shelf after shelf without finding either a copy or a recording. And yet, for all that obscurity—and despite Grieg's admitted discomfort with such works—the Piano Sonata in E minor is, in its own way, quite an appealing work, like a colorful and clever, but admittedly underdeveloped child. The first of its four movements, Allegro moderato, rides forth on a vital theme that seems to want to plumb the very depths of the earth; if the figurations that surround it and the manner in which it is built up over the course of the movement seem somewhat juvenile, the same might be said of many a more-famous sonata composer's earliest efforts. The Andante molto second movement has just a touch of the same time-stands-still magic that graces the slow movement of the composer's Piano Concerto (written some three years later). The third movement—Alla minuetto, ma poco più lento—may be uncomfortably heavy-handed, but its peculiar Nordic flavor and odd dissonances at least add novelty. The finale gallops forth in 6/8 meter and has a chorale-like second subject which, during the recapitulation, achieves the happy E major in which the sonata closes.

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