Another weekday, another offer by YourClassical of a
free classical music piece.
Today's
freebie comes from the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg. The album that the
free piece comes from is a Naxos album of his works, entitled
Grieg - Norwegian Dances - Ballade Slatter (Suite for Orchestra).
The particular piece that we are allowed to grab for
free is a 4 minute, 19 second piece called
Lyric Pieces, Book 5: No. 6 Ringing Bells.
Everything on the album is performed by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, with Bjarte Engeset conducting. Of course, some of you may wish to know much more about the album than that. If so, you're in luck. YourClassical has a link on this webpage to
a dedicated Naxos webpage for the entire album. It is the link labelled, "Naxos 8557854."
From
that same webpage that I just referenced, you can stream the song or download it; they'll even let you do both, if you want to.
The stream bar will be apparent; the link to use to download the
free MP3 is, fittingly enough, labeled "Direct MP3 download link."
I didn't care much for the
free piece. It is too stirring, too busy, not relaxing enough for the way that I like to use classical music.
It seems that fewgreat composers came out of Norway. Actually, Grieg is the only one that I know of. 'Course with the temperatures hovering around 100 degrees below zero in winter (just kidding--I think), that tends to make people choose other places to live, and that's probably a big reason that Norway does not have a very large population, a population large enough to create a lot of great composers.
My great-grandfather left Norway for the New World about the time that Grieg's work would have been peaking in the late 1800's. Both of them were from Bergen, my great-grandfather traveled by ship from there to Canada, before moving to the U.S. I have wondered many times how many Grieg songs my great-grandfather may have heard growing up and how I may be listening to some of those very songs today. Of course, too, he may not have even liked classical music. ha