Finishing Each Other's Sentences

Finishing Each Other’s Sentences

A few days ago I heard the Franke Quintet take part in an unusual rescue mission: They played Michael Finnissy’s reconstruction of the Grieg B-flat piano quintet.

Written By

Colin Holter

A few days ago I heard the Franke Quintet take part in an unusual rescue mission: They played Michael Finnissy’s reconstruction of the Grieg B-flat piano quintet, a piece which until recently existed only as a development section. The first 232 bars or so came from Grieg, but everything after that—roughly 20 minutes of music—was Finnissy’s best Grieg impression. And it was a pretty good one, too: His contribution revealed more about Grieg than it did about Finnissy.

In his pre-concert conversation with the players, the composer revealed the measure number of the boundary-line separating his notes from Grieg’s. Naturally, it was difficult to avoid playing a somewhat silly game of spot-the-seam once the development’s repeat started to wind down. For me, this was the most interesting part of the piece; I found myself assessing material and formal “weirdnesses” and wondering whether they belonged to Finnissy or Grieg. This seems like it might be a pretty easy and dull exercise, but the quintet’s development—the part I knew was written by Grieg—was actually really weird. My knowledge of Grieg’s work is very limited, and I was constantly surprised by the impressionistic harmonies, ethereal textures, and sudden shifts of affect. Given such mercurial seeds, Finnissy had a difficult line to walk: If he adopts Grieg’s eccentricities too enthusiastically, the result may be construed as overly modern (i.e., Finnissian); if he plays it safe, cleaving too closely to the late-Romantic textbook, it’s not convincingly Griegish based on the preexisting, genuinely strange development.

Finnissy, who claimed to be satisfied with about 75 percent of his reconstruction, was savvy. He channeled Grieg with great sensitivity and seemed, to my ear, to be just outrageous enough; if I had heard the piece without knowing Finnissy’s role, I certainly wouldn’t have suspected that the whole thing wasn’t from Grieg. Now I’m wondering how many fragments of unfinished 19th-century pieces are out there—I want to get my mitts on one before they’re all taken!