Rubicon Classics is pleased to announce the third solo album for the label from pianist Alexander Ullman, presenting here a programme of Edvard Grieg’s Moods, Songs and Lyric Pieces. The prize of the album, Alexander’s own transcriptions of music from the Peer Gynt Suite no.1, draws out the colour of the orchestra from the piano, perhaps more than the composer’s own.

Like Chopin, Grieg was more comfortable creating exquisite miniatures rather than large scale orchestral works. Both produced concertos for the piano, and Grieg’s example is one of the most popular in the repertoire, but it is in his small-scale solo works that his poetic musical expression had free reign. Conductor Hans von Bülow called him ‘The Chopin of the North’. Grieg’s music is full of Norwegian folk idioms, as his Lyric Pieces vividly illustrate.