(Leader, ALFRED BARKER )
Conductor, T. H. MORRISON
There can be but few pianists, however modest their attainments, who have not played some at least of Grieg's many lyric pieces for the pianoforte. They must be at least as well known as Mendelssohn's Songs without Words, were to our grandparents, and they have certainly had a very large share in making Grieg's name the household word which it is. - Towards the end of last century it occurred to the great conductor, Anton Seidl, that some of them were admirably adapted for orchestral arrangement, as, indeed, they are ; he accordingly arranged four, scoring them effecti vely for a big orchestra. Grieg himself approved of the idea, though the actual orchestration struck him as a little too heavy for the light nature of the pieces, and he accordingly rearranged the second, third, and fourth numbers himself in a simpler way, and substituted the ' Shepherd Boy' for the first which Seidl had chosen. He scored it for strings and harp only.