Johan Halvorsen (1864–1935) was a Norwegian composer and violinist. His best-known works today are Entry of the Boyars and Bergensiana (variations on the hymn of the city of Bergen), along with his Passacaglia and Sarabande (duos for violin and viola based on themes by George Frideric Handel).
He wrote a lot of music performed in plays at the National Theatre in Oslo, where he conducted the pit orchestra 1899–1929. In the last decade of his life he finished somewhat belatedly three symphonies and two Norwegian rhapsodies in the romantic and nationalistic style of Edvard Grieg and Johan Svendsen.
Halvorsen considered his Norwegian Fairy Tale Pictures to be one of his best works. The suite is colourful and vividly programmatic, drawn from music that Halvorsen had written for a children’s comedy.
The second movement is the Dance of the Troll Maidens, comparable to the piece in Act 2 of Grieg’s Peer Gynt stage music called Peer Gynt and the Woman in Green. In Ibsen’s play this is a young female troll performing a grotesque dance dressed in green for the occasion.
Halvorsen’s music is also suitably grotesque, emphasizing that trolls don’t have the skills to behave gracefully when they imitate humans.
This fact should not be forgotten when performing (or listening to) the music. We should imagine trolls moving erratically with unexpected twists and crazy moves. By the way, the conductor should have in mind that the music loses its burlesque character if taken too slowly.
Eventually, the tempo picks up and the trolls respond by becoming more chaotic and unrythmic, causing the music to break down with some unlikely sounds, even more jarringly before coming to a halt. The troll maidens hurridly leave the stage and the orchestra finishes with some very nice chords that trolls surely detest.
The harp part is optional and incorporated into other parts, notably melodic percussion. There are cues in various parts whenever oboes and bassoons are prominent.
The sound clip is computer generated using sampled sounds (AI). Transcriptions and descriptions are not AI-generated.
Set contains one score and one copy of each part, as download or on paper. Copying allowed by acquiring band for their performances only. Additional copies may be obtained from the J. W. Pepper webshop.
The suite consists of: I. Peik, The Princess, and The Giant Troll | More II. Dance of the Troll Maidens III. The Princess Riding on the Bear | More IV. Entry of Trolls into the Blue Mountain | More V. Dance of the Little Trolls | More
Johan Halvorsen (1864–1935) was a Norwegian composer and violinist. His best-known works today are Entry of the Boyars and Bergensiana (variations on the hymn of the city of Bergen), along with his Passacaglia and Sarabande (duos for violin and viola based on themes by George Frideric Handel).
