Talk:Piano Concerto (Grieg)

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I heard Olga Kern play this piece up at the Bear Valley Music Festival in August 2005, and I totally fell in love with this music. All three movements are a pleasure with not a wasted or idle note. If you get a chance to see Olga play this, do so... she brings the house down. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 69.233.198.14 (talk • contribs) 02:37, 13 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Edmund Neupert

I was surprised to read that Neupert was the soloist at the premiere, but this seems to be stated in many places so I assume it's now the received wisdom. I'd always thought it was Grieg himself who played the premiere. That's what Slonimsky and Grove 5 both say.

• Webster's New World Dictionary of Music (Slonimsky; later ed. Richard Kassel, published 1998) says "He [Grieg] played the solo part in the world premiere of his Piano Concerto in Copenhagen (1869), thus establishing himself as a major composer at age 25".
• Grove 5 (reprinted 1966, admittedly getting on a bit now, but I don't have any later Grove) says of the concerto "Its first performance took place at Copenhagen on 3 Apr. 1869 with the composer as soloist".

And Grove 5 has no article on Edmund Neupert at all, which is surprising if Neupert was compared favourably with Liszt in his time, and was even said to have composed the 1st movement cadenza himself.

I can only conclude that more recent research has discovered who the real soloist was. Can anyone comment on this? -- JackofOz 04:41, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

Curiously, I am unable to find anything in the current Grove online about the premiere: normally they have that stuff in the works list at the end of the composer's article. A trip to a library may be necessary to get to the bottom of this. I find various things on the internet, most of which support the idea that Neupert first played it on April 3, 1869 in Copenhagen (for example, this). I would look at one of the biographies/biographical studies --for example R. Matthew-Walker: Edvard Grieg: a Biographical Study (Kenwyn, 1993), or K. Falch Johannessen: Edvard Grieg (Bergen, 1993 -- that one is probably in Norwegian). Antandrus (talk) 15:25, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. Yes, before I posted this query I did a bit of research and found many references to it being Neupert. But I'm still curious why it was, at least until 1998, thought to have been Grieg if that was not actually the case. My theory - which is all it is - is that Grieg planned to play the premiere, and had playbills and programmes etc printed with his name on them as soloist, but other matters intervened and he had to arrange for Neupert to take over at the last minute, and didn't have time to issue amended programmes and playbills. That printed material, in the absence of any contradictory documentation, would have been prima facie evidence to lexicographers like Slonimsky and Grove that Grieg was the soloist. Yet a newspaper critique of the performance would surely have mentioned Neupert if he had in fact been the soloist, and Slonimsky knew all about critics and their propensity for venom (do you know his Lexicon of Musical Invective?), so I'd be surprised if he didn't track such a review down - assuming there was one - to see what it might have contained. If Slonimsky turns out to have been wrong, this would be one of the rare times that I've ever discovered him to be in error (some others I can recall being the date of Leoncavallo's birth, and the date of Dame Clara Butt's death). -- JackofOz 05:25, 19 October 2007 (UTC)