Goossens Conducts Grieg

Eugene Goossens

The talented English conductor Eugene Goossens has not appeared on these blogs for more than 15 years, and so perhaps it's time he reappeared. Today he does so with a composer whose music he often recorded - Edvard Grieg. Most of the program is taken up by the two suites from Grieg's incidental music for Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt. The makeweight is the composer's Two Elegiac Melodies.

Grieg's most popular work on the concert platform is likely the Piano Concerto. But for popularity, the Peer Gynt suites would not be far behind.

It's ironic that Grieg's suites these days are usually consigned to the summer season or to pops concerts. They come from a play that was considered radical for its day. According to the Norwegian Ibsen Company, "Ibsen wrote Peer Gynt in deliberate disregard of the limitations that the conventional stagecraft of the 19th century imposed on drama. Its 40 scenes move uninhibitedly in time and space and between consciousness and the unconscious, blending folkloric fantasy and unsentimental realism."

Edvard Grieg, Henrik Ibsen

Ibsen himself chose Grieg to write the music for this tale, and the composer responded with some of his most memorable - and popular - themes. The story's ambulatory plot of a journey from Norway to Africa and back provided Grieg with ample opportunities for colorful music, most famously with "In the Hall of the Mountain King."

Goossens recorded the music on four occasions: The Suite No. 1 in 1927, 1937 and 1945, and the Suite No. 2 in 1928. For this program we have the 1937 Suite No. 1 and the 1928 Suite No. 2. (I wanted to include the 1947 recording as well, but one of the sides was unplayable.)

1937 label; 1928 label

Goossens conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra for the first suite, and the New Light Symphony Orchestra (perhaps a recording aggregation) for the second. The sound for all these pieces is quite good for the period, and the performances are affectionate.

The Two Elegiac Melodies - "The Wounded Heart (Hjertesár)" and "The Last Spring (Váren)" also were recorded in 1937 with the LPO and are just as sympathetically done.

LINK to Grieg recordings

More from Eugene Goossens

Although Goossens is little remembered these days, he was a skilled conductor (and composer) who made many excellent recordings. Here are two that have appeared on the main blog, which are now newly refurbished in ambient stereo. The links in the subheads below lead to the original posts.

Vaughan Williams - A London Symphony. The composer's second symphony elicited a detailed and idiomatic reading from Goossens conducting the Cincinnati Symphony, which he led from 1931-46. This recording comes from 1941, and is unusual in that it is of the 1920 version of the symphony, which Vaughan Williams later revised.

The cover at left ascribes the performance to the "Cromwell Symphony Orchestra." It came out during the early 1950s, when Victor's budget label Camden used pseudonyms on its classical reissues, for whatever reason.

Britten - A Simple Symphony. Here's what I wrote about this piece 16 years ago: "It's amazing (and perhaps a little daunting) to read that Britten composed some of this material when he was as young as nine, and assembled it into this delightful and memorable string symphony when he was 20."

The composer must have liked what he heard from Goossens and the recording orchestra in 1953 - he wrote the liner notes for this 10-inch LP.