Aeon's 2005 recording of Ibsen's 1867 verse play Peer Gynt, including the incidental music by Edvard Grieg, grew out of performances in Geneva in 1998 and 2000 featuring L'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and Le Motet de Genève. The concert version, which required trimming the five-hour play to a manageable two hours, included all of Grieg's music and enough of Ibsen's text, along with linking narration written by Alain Perroux, to provide the listener with a context for following the story. It can't be claimed to have the ...
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Aeon's 2005 recording of Ibsen's 1867 verse play Peer Gynt, including the incidental music by Edvard Grieg, grew out of performances in Geneva in 1998 and 2000 featuring L'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and Le Motet de Genève. The concert version, which required trimming the five-hour play to a manageable two hours, included all of Grieg's music and enough of Ibsen's text, along with linking narration written by Alain Perroux, to provide the listener with a context for following the story. It can't be claimed to have the same impact as hearing the music incorporated into the full play (a virtual impossibility, given the economics of theatrical productions and the attention span of modern audiences), but it is probably as close an approximation of that experience as can reasonably be expected, and as such it's highly successful. Sections of the play for which Grieg provided underscoring are even more powerfully effective when heard in context than when isolated from it, as is usual in the orchestral...
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