Peer Gynt Suite No. 1
Edward Grieg (1843–1907)

Being a Scandinavian duo it just felt natural to present a piece that reflects our heritage and mood. Many of us have as children been scared by the frightening theme in ‘The Hall of the Mountain King’. Now it’s pay back time, even if we are not so sure we would ever like to be referred to as ‘scary guitarists’ in, let’s say, a critics review...
    Edvard Grieg is by far Norway’s most celebrated composer, not least thanks to his two Peer Gynt suites. Curiously enough though, he was very close to not composing them: The equally famous Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen asked him in 1874 to write music for his play ‘Peer Gynt’, which he had written 7 years earlier, in order to increase his chances to getting it performed. Grieg wasn’t very fond of the idea, but as he at the time suffered from a kind of negative cash flow—a phenomenon well known to many artists and often referred to as ‘being broke’—he finally agreed.
    He wrote a total of 23 movements for the play and then later selected the most effective ones and assembled them on purely musical grounds into the two orchestral suites, each of four movements.
    Originally we planned to perform the ‘Mountain King’s’ characteristic finale with the kind of leg cymbals you sometimes see street musicians use, but they made us look less chic in our tails so we had to settle for good old foot stomping instead.

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