Grieg: Two Brown Eyes from “Melodies Of The Heart, Op. 5, No. 4

Acclaimed and cherished as one of Australia’s finest operatic artists, Nance Grant had a voice possessed with beauty and power, an ease of technique, a perfection of phrasing and taste that cemented her place in the hearts of Australian music lovers. This long overdue tribute presents one of the great sopranos from down under - in recordings previously thought lost.

Nance Grant chose to stay close to her family in Australia rather than pursue an international career, even though Sir Edward Downes insisted he could ‘fill her books’ with performances in Britain and Europe. So this double album offers those who never had the opportunity to hear her, the gift of discovering a voice of magnitude and generosity, and for those who grew up hearing her on stage, the chance to reacquaint themselves with her artistry.

The original tapes from radio broadcasts of the 1960s and ’70s have been carefully restored to give more than a hint of the majesty of Nance Grant in a characteristic range of repertoire. The recordings represent significant landmarks in the development of opera in Australia: the emerging Victorian State Opera’s enormously successful Idomeneo, re di Creta, and Maria Stuarda under the direction of Richard Divall; Australian Opera’s Ariadne auf Naxos, Fidelio and Tannhäuser with Sir Edward Downes; and one of the first of the Australian Opera/ABC collaborations presenting concert performances of Wagner operas, with Grant as Sieglinde in Die Walküre conducted by Leif Segerstam.

The programme also pays homage to Nance’s considerable concert career, including a complete song recital - Greig, Richard Hageman and Richard Strauss - with pianist Geoffrey Parsons, Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra, and an excerpt from Mendelssohn’s Elijah.

Although Grieg and Elgar did not physically cross paths (they neither met nor corresponded), there are enough biographical and musical parallels to beg the question as to why the relationship between them has been largely overlooked. It is these points of contact that makes the combination of these two works on this recording particularly apposite. One has only to consider the similarity in their status not merely as ‘nationalistic composers’ but as important national figures. There are also various biographical parallels: they shared several mutual friends of whom the English composer Frederick Delius is the most notable, Elgar received an honorary doctorate at Oxford University in 1905, Grieg received the same award a year later; during the first orchestral broadcast of Elgar’s music in 1923, the accompanying piece in the program was Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite. Quite apart from these historical parallels there are many mutual points of contact in their compositions, particularly in the case of the two sonatas performed on this CD, one being that the completion of both sonatas coincided with a distancing of their respective writers from the musical nationalism for which they were most associated