Edvard Grieg: "Morning Mood" (Morgenstimmung)

When I woke up this Saturday morning, I suddenly had the idea to create a completely new rendition of a music I had not really planned for: Edvard Grieg's "Morning Mood", which is the first movement of the Peer Gynt Suite No.1. This is a very popular piece, one of the standard "war horses" of classical concert music. Back in 2000 I had already created a version of the 4th movement of that suite: "In the Hall of the Mountain King". At that time it took me one month to complete the rendition of that 4th movement, and now I was curious to see how long it would take me with improved techniques and technology to create the rendition of the first movement. They have almost an identical number of bars (1st movement: 87, 4th movement: 88), but the score of the 4th movement goes over 16 pages, while the 1st movement only covers 14 pages. Still relatively close.

I began at 10am in the morning, using the standard orchestra template I had created with the Garritan Personal Orchestra 4 samples. Initially I worked only in small segments, creating renditions of complete pages, and I was able to work at a rate of 2 pages per hour. Then I changed the strategy and completed individual instrument tracks to the very end: bassoon and strings were the first to be completed. Since the were several laborious 16th note segments, I could not uphold the original work speed, but the complete movement was finished at 7pm - and that includes lunch and dinner break. One more hour to fix some tempo and volume balance issues, and the movement was ready.

This was a new speed record: I am now able to create a rendition of one complete movement of moderate difficulty within one single day.

The tempo in the Eulenburg No. 1318 score is given as 3/8 = 60 bpm. I personally feel that is is a bit fast and rushed, and I think that most conductors take it slower than this. But the movement is titled "Allegretto", so it is not really intended to be too slow.

The recording is available on my page as MP3 file and as WMA file.

I hope you enjoy this rendition!