Grieg plays Grieg

This exhilarating recording is of Edvard Grieg playing his own 'Wedding Day at Troldhaugen' - brisk tempo, fresh tone, a distant memory. It dates from 1903. This year, of course, marks the centenary of his death.

It took me a long time to recover from my first trip to Bergen about seven years ago. It was late May, but we got caught in a blizzard up a mountain, had to buy thick woolly jerseys in the harbour market and discovered that the town's slot machines, instead of chocolate, held umbrellas. And you cannot get away from Grieg. Every shop, every bus, every everything, pipes out Grieg until you start pitying the poor people who have to live with it.

And yet...his house at Troldhaugen is probably the most beautiful composer museum I've seen. It's preserved exquisitely - you imagine that he or his wife Nina might stroll in any moment, brush a soft note from the piano (on which Andsnes has recorded the appropriate music) and guide you down to the bottom of the garden, where the glorified shed in which Grieg liked to compose overlooks first the trees, then the fjord, at last eternity. His grave is embedded in the rocks, deep inside the earth that he loved.

You can assuredly have too much of the war-horses in the form we usually hear them. The piano concerto, the Peer Gynt suite, etc. But the reality goes further than this. A revelatory CD unfurls the full extent of the Peer Gynt incidental music, together with some of the Ibsen, astonishing and inventive when presented in its original form; the Lyric Pieces are intimate, gorgeous, incredibly imaginative slivers of perfection; and the violin sonatas and songs often drag an involuntary tear from the hardest of hearts (at least, I hope they do; the hearts of British critics are far harder than even I had imagined, but enough of that...).

The Wigmore Hall has a Grieg anniversary concert tomorrow featuring chamber music and songs: artists include the matchless Solveig Kringelborn, and our pals Philippe Graffin and Raphael Wallfisch will be strutting their stuff too.

The weather forecast, appropriately enough, is for rain.

And by the way, if anyone wants to glean schadenfreude from the way they imagine I may be licking my wounds over the Heliane reviews, they can't. My beloved colleagues are wrong. And I am proud to the last tooth of what the LPO and Jurowski achieved last week, and privileged to have been part of it. Nor was I the only person in the hall standing up to applaud at the end.

Can you imagine...

...any "normal" radio station taking a risk on broadcasting a four-and-a-half hour piano work by a contemporary American composer? Our friend Pliable has an outlet for just such a work, however, at Overgrown Path's slot on the internet-based Future Radio. The piece is Alvin Curran's Inner Cities, the date is 5 December.

Is the internet the future of music radio? If you are tiring of nose flutes on Radio 3 and sofa ads on Classic FM, if you would like to see broadcasting champion experimental, creative, thought-provoking work, even if it's niche, you may well agree that it is. I reckon this is just the beginning. Read all about it here.

Wilhelm Kempff, 112

Wonderful Webmaster, a fount of anniversary knowledge, writes to remind me that today is the birthday of Wilhelm Kempff, who was born in Juterborg on 25 November 1895. Here is the great pianist doing what he did best: profound Beethoven. The slow movement of the D minor Sonata Op.31 No.2, the 'Tempest', recorded in Paris in 1968.

BTW

If anyone logs on today after receiving an automated alert about a post called 'The Truth about Ingerland', apologies - it needed a lot more work and I've deleted it for the time being. More soon.

And now for something completely different: Cecilia and Maria

Cecilia Bartoli has just brought out a fabulous new CD of music written for and by the legendary 19th-century diva Maria Malibran, Pauline Viardot's big sister and an inspiration to Bellini, Rossini and Mendelssohn, amongst others.

I went to Paris a few weeks back to meet her in her Malibran Bus - a converted lorry in which her ample collection of Malibran memorabilia is on display. It was parked on the Place de la Sorbonne, causing double-takes all round, and it's coming to London with her in December, when she has two concerts at the Barbican (both already sold out!). Here's my article from The Independent a few days ago. I think it ran on Wednesday. I regret to say that I was so busy with the 'Heliane' talk preparations that I hadn't even realised it had come out.

The disc is wonderfully accompanied by a Swiss period-instrument ensemble, La Scintilla, which brings a whole new colour to the bel canto world - it's like watching by candlelight. There's plenty of Bellini and Pacini, but also marvellous virtuoso numbers by Malibran and her father; and for me, the highlight of the disc is a substantial Mendelssohn concert aria 'Infelice', written for Malibran and her second husband, the violinist Charles de Beriot. Bartoli has drafted in Maxim Vengerov to play the solo. It's a masterpiece.

I first read about 'Infelice' a couple of years ago when I was researching Viardot for the St Nazaire 2006 project, and tried to track it down for the show. In the end we dropped the idea since it was rather tangential and much too long for the Viardot/Turgenev story - we already had way too much stuff. But I was sad not to see or hear it. What a treat to discover it on this disc, in the best possible hands.

Another interesting concept: you can get the CD and its associated printed matter in a standard edition, or a deluxe hardback edition, or a superdeluxe version with DVD thrown in for good measure.

Here's a video about it: