MUSIC / CHRIS PASLES : Chamber Fest Gives Grieg Due

This month marks the 150th anniversary of Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg’s birth. But there are very few local events that will mark it.

One of those is the modest Seal Beach Chamber Music Festival, which opens Thursday at the McGaugh School Auditorium. Founder and cellist Alan Parker has programmed music by Grieg on four of the eight free concerts, which run weekly through Aug. 12.

“Grieg is like a lot of the nationalist Romantics and a bit out of vogue these days,” Parker said in a recent interview from his home in Northridge. “I can think of a number of critics who sneer or cringe when you program Grieg. But I think there is more to his music than a lot of people think.”

The festival will include Grieg’s well-known String Quartet in G minor (July 9), various piano pieces (July 15, 22 and 29) and the Cello Sonata, with Parker and pianist John Jensen (July 22). Another Grieg work had been planned for Thursday’s concert but has been dropped because of scheduling problems.

“Grieg’s style is very much based on folk song,” Parker said. “It must have had a tremendous impact when first heard. It would have been incredibly fresh. Anything we can do to recapture that is a service to music.”

But Grieg learned to appreciate that folk-song style. It did not come naturally.

A musically precocious child, he began taking lessons at the age of 6 from his mother, a highly regarded pianist in his native city of Bergen. He entered the Leipzig Conservatory of music when he was 15, but the pedantic teaching methods he encountered there left him with a lifelong distaste for the institution.

Even so, his music reflected that Germanic influence until 1864, when he met the brilliant 22-year-old nationalist composer Rikard Nordraak. Nordraak was at the center of a movement dedicated to creating a distinctively Norwegian musical style, and his enthusiasm soon fired up the 21-year-old Grieg.

“Through him,” Grieg wrote, “I first learned to know the northern folk tunes and my own nature.”

Grieg, Nordraak and two other musicians then founded the Euterpe society for the promotion of Scandinavian music.

But Nordraak died a year later from an unspecified illness. He was only 23 but had already crafted a style of his own, although his works are scarcely known today. Grieg dedicated his “Humeresker” for piano, Opus 6, to Nordraak, and also wrote a funeral march for him.

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Grieg was the one who went on to become the first Scandinavian composer to achieve international fame and great popularity.

His Piano Concerto in A minor, composed when he was 25, the two suites he drew from the incidental music for Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt” and his songs have introduced many young people to classical music.

Grieg eventually went beyond his interest in nationalism, although he never completely abandoned it. He composed his Quartet in G minor in 1877, feeling completely dissatisfied with everything he had written earlier.

“The string quartet has a number of folk elements,” Parker said, “but also strong elements of concert music. There is a movement in sonata form and the work ends with a very brilliant moto perpetuo in tarantella rhythm that’s exciting to play.”

Although Grieg wrote the Cello Sonata in 1883 for his brother, an amateur cellist, “it’s actually really demanding,” Parker said. “But it’s tailored so well to the instrument--it’s as if the brother spent some time with Edvard showing him how the cello works and showing him what works well.”

The work has an improvisatory feeling, with the main theme constantly appearing in new guises.

It’s precisely that improvisatory element that Parker feels is missing from most playing of Grieg’s music today.

Parker said he learned to appreciate this style from an old recording of the A-minor concerto with Percy Grainger as the soloist. Grainger, the American freewheeling composer and pianist, was a friend of the composer.

“If you take yourself terribly seriously and if you try to play in the style of Brahms or Wagner--very Teutonic and serious--all that does is to expose its structural weaknesses,” Parker said.

“If you play it in a lighter, more improvisatory, gentle style, which has more of the nature of fiddling or folk music and less the nature of the operatic ego expressing itself, the music works much better and it’s charming. It’s really very beautiful, melodically and harmonically.”

* The Seal Beach Chamber Music Festival opens Thursday at 8 p.m., with music by Mozart, J.C. Bach and other composers, in the McGaugh School Auditorium, 1698 Bolsa Ave., Seal Beach. Free. (310) 431-0950. *

O.C. SYMPHONY REACTS--Orange County Symphony board members will meet with the Garden Grove Community Services and Arts Commission tonight in an effort to reverse a city council decision giving money earmarked for the orchestra to the foundering GroveShakespeare theater troupe.

“We’re going to down there to state our position,” board chairman Lorraine Reafsnyder said Tuesday.

Last week the city council took $5,500 that the arts commission had recommended for the orchestra and used it to double a grant recommended for GroveShakepeare, which has canceled its summer season.

Reafsnyder, whose orchestra has its own share of financial problems, was upset last week that she “didn’t know about (that council meeting) until the day after.” Deputy city manager Michael Fenderson said he could “understand how (Reafsnyder) feels” but noted that it had been a regular monthly meeting. “I don’t know that we notified any of the groups,” he said. “They knew that the recommendation was pending. Generally, those organizations follow the process pretty closely and stay on top of it. Routinely, they watch us.”

“Every cent means a lot to us,” Reafsnyder said. “We feel let down by the people who were our true supporters.” But whatever happens, she added, “We’re not going to let this drive us out of business. We’ve got five new people on the board, they’re very strong in the community, and they want to make the symphony work.”