It’s 100 years to the day that Edvard Grieg died. We’re in his laketop house near Bergen, listening to his music on his piano. And at the keyboard is probably the best thing to come out of Norway since Grieg’s own unassailably popular piano concerto – the meltingly sensitive and fiercely transporting Leif Ove Andsnes.

Andsnes, thankfully, is something better than Grieg’s best champion: he is Grieg’s best critic. The piece we are listening to is not a mainstream work from the small canon of Grieg classics. It’s a world away from the winsome and much more celebrated Lyric Pieces – the sort of Grieg that encouraged Debussy to call his rival’s works “pink bonbons stuffed with snow.”

He couldn’t have made the same allegation about the tortured Ballade in G Minor, which forms the centrepiece (and only new item) of Ansdnes’s new compilation CD for the anniversary year, Ballad for Edvard Grieg. “It does have some variations that are awkward and even badly written,” Andsnes admits candidly and matter of factly, “and I had to find pianistic solutions.”

The charismatic and approachable 37-year-old had already been thrust into pole position for one Grieg anniversary – the composer’s 150th birthday party in 1993 . So this year Andsnes set himself a challenge. He complemented his work on the tricky Ballade by making a documentary on the composer for Norwegian television, travelling around Europe in Grieg’s footsteps, and even hauling himself up a mountain to have a go at the piece at altitude (the piano was winched up by helicopter, and, no, it wasn’t valuable). “That was mainly for effect,” he laughs, “but it’s such a beautiful cliché that it was difficult to avoid.”

In any case, the results, pouring turbulently out from Grieg’s own piano on a late summer’s evening, are powerfully evocative. “There’s a very dark quality about the piece,” says Andsnes, “because when Grieg wrote it he didn’t know which direction to go. He had all these big hits but he wasn’t sure he could follow up on them, and when you look at the rest of his output, you see that he couldn’t. That was a great trauma for him.”

Have we all misunderstood Grieg? “He has become such a Norwegian icon that when we hear his music we immediately think ‘Norwegian’, we see waterfalls and fjords. But in fact he hated the Norwegian chauvinistic character. What we think of today as something very Norwegian might just be very Grieg.”

Thankfully British audiences will have their chance to hear the “new” Grieg as well as the old. In March, Andsnes will play the Ballade as part of his Festival Hall recital. And, yes, he’ll play that concerto in Birmingham on December 13 – a piece that, judging from an exquisite public performance the next night in Bergen, he still plays with majestic reverence. “That’s music at its best,” he says, “a true force of nature.”

Ballad for Edvard Grieg is out now on EMI Classics

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