Uploaded October 2023 | Updated September 2026, 9 hours ago
Quartet for String Orchestra in G Minor
Edvard Grieg
The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra
Gábor Takács-Nagy, conductor
Recorded June 9-10, 2023 at the Ordway Concert Hall
Watch the full version in our free Concert Library: content.thespco.org/music/concert-library/composition/quartet-for-string-orchestra-no-1-edvard-grieg
About the Music:
Edvard Grieg was the first great Scandinavian composer. His studies in Leipzig grounded him in the Germanic tradition, but upon his return to his native Norway, he delved into local folk music and launched a national music academy. In 1876, he completed a collaboration with Norway’s most celebrated writer, Henrik Ibsen, providing incidental music for the play Peer Gynt which remains his most recognizable calling card. That same year, Grieg wrote a series of song settings on poems by Ibsen, including the song “Spillemaend” about a water spirit from Norwegian folklore.
That song melody became the basis of a string quartet that Grieg began the next year while staying among the fjords and forests of Norway’s gorgeous Hardanger district. During a sojourn that ended up lasting through the winter and on to the next summer, Grieg wrote the Quartet in G Minor, his first foray into that genre since a lost student work he attempted at 18.
As he wrote in a letter to a friend, his intention in the quartet was to strive toward “breadth, vigor, flight of imagination, and, above all, fullness of tone for the instruments for which it is written.”
Program Notes © 2023 Aaron Grad
Quartet for String Orchestra in G Minor
Edvard Grieg
The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra
Gábor Takács-Nagy, conductor
Recorded June 9-10, 2023 at the Ordway Concert Hall
Watch the full version in our free Concert Library: content.thespco.org/music/concert-library/composition/quartet-for-string-orchestra-no-1-edvard-grieg
About the Music:
Edvard Grieg was the first great Scandinavian composer. His studies in Leipzig grounded him in the Germanic tradition, but upon his return to his native Norway, he delved into local folk music and launched a national music academy. In 1876, he completed a collaboration with Norway’s most celebrated writer, Henrik Ibsen, providing incidental music for the play Peer Gynt which remains his most recognizable calling card. That same year, Grieg wrote a series of song settings on poems by Ibsen, including the song “Spillemaend” about a water spirit from Norwegian folklore.
That song melody became the basis of a string quartet that Grieg began the next year while staying among the fjords and forests of Norway’s gorgeous Hardanger district. During a sojourn that ended up lasting through the winter and on to the next summer, Grieg wrote the Quartet in G Minor, his first foray into that genre since a lost student work he attempted at 18.
As he wrote in a letter to a friend, his intention in the quartet was to strive toward “breadth, vigor, flight of imagination, and, above all, fullness of tone for the instruments for which it is written.”
Program Notes © 2023 Aaron Grad
