Noctave
The piece
Grieg wrote this music in 1875 for Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt: it opens the fourth act, a sunrise over the Moroccan desert. He later put it at the head of his first orchestral suite, Op. 46, and made the piano version played here himself, following the New York edition of 1900. A single four-bar theme moves between the high and middle registers like two instruments answering each other, changes key at each return, climbs to a broad forte, then settles in the bass before a run of trills and a last E major chord.
The left hand lays down wide chords, often more than an octave across: the wavy line in front of them asks you to spread them quickly from the bottom up, pedal down, so the top note arrives with the tune. Under the melody, the right hand often holds a second voice: let it ring without striking it again. From bar 30, the left hand now and then crosses over the right to take two of the sixteenth notes. In bars 36 to 47 the music travels through distant keys: read them slowly, one hand after the other.