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The Gaggle Music Club: Edvard Grieg's Holberg Suite

This week's selection for The Gaggle Music Club is Edvard Grieg's Holberg Suite, Op. 40.

Edvard Grieg (1843–1907) was Norway’s most celebrated Romantic composer. Drawing on native folk melodies and dances, he merged them with European Romantic idioms (especially Mendelssohn, Schumann and Chopin).

Grieg was not a prolific composer of large-scale works. Instead, his gift lay in the miniature: lyric pieces, songs, chamber music and works with an intimate, poetic tone. However, Grieg could also do character and color, as shown in orchestral works such as the Peer Gynt suites.

Composed in 1884, the Holberg Suite was commissioned to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754), a Danish-Norwegian playwright and satirist often called “the Molière of the North.”

Grieg decided to pay homage to the era of Holberg rather than to illustrate his life or works. The result is a Neoclassical suite, adopting the stylized forms and gestures of Baroque dance music—a nostalgic musical re-creation of Holberg’s 18th-century world.

Grieg originally composed it for solo piano and only later arranged it for string orchestra.

The Holberg Suite is one of Grieg’s finest orchestral achievements, and among the very few works in which he steps outside Norwegian folk tradition to embrace cosmopolitan musical homage. Interestingly, Grieg was among the first to experiments with historical stylization — a rare venture into Neoclassicism before the style became widespread in the 20th century. It's hard not to miss the strains of Stravinsky's Pulcinella here. Though Grieg was no modernist, the Holberg Suite comes across as a Romantic forerunner of the 20th century’s backward-glancing stylistic innovations.

Grieg’s Holberg Suite is a charming homage to the past, unmistakably colored by Grieg’s lyrical voice. It combines Baroque formality with Romantic expressiveness, and is today one of the most beloved string orchestra works in the repertoire.

This is a recording by the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, with artistic director Pekka Kuusisto.

00:21:03
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The Gaggle Music Club: Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain"

This week's selection for The Gaggle Music Club is "Night on Bald Mountain" by Modest Mussorgsky.

Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky (1839–1881), one of the most distinctive voices in 19th-century Russian music, was a member of the “Mighty Handful” that also included Mily Balakirev, César Cui, Alexander Borodin and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. The Five’s mission was to break from Western European models and forge an authentically Russian style, drawing on folk melody, native idioms and Orthodox liturgy. Mussorgsky was perhaps the least conventional of the group, and the one whose music most strongly resisted later academic tidying up. His rejection of Western compositional norms, favoring speech-like vocal lines, abrupt modulations and stark orchestral colors, made him seem unrefined to contemporaries, but visionary to later composers.

The piece that is now called "Night on Bald Mountain" was not a single, straightforward composition. The piece audiences are most familiar with is Rimsky-Korsakov’s 1886 orchestration ...

00:13:36
TG 1948: Ukraine Cuts Off Hungary's Oil Supply; Trump Steps In

George Szamuely and Peter Lavelle discuss Ukraine's repeated attacks on the Druzhba oil pipeline that lead to cutoffs in Hungary's oil supply, and wonder what Kiev's motives may be in launching such attacks.

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TG 1947: NATO's Deceit Over The Ukraine "Security Guarantees"

George Szamuely discusses NATO's attempt to fool the world over the "robust security guarantees" that President Trump and Russia have supposedly signed on to.

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August 20, 2025

https://www.rt.com/news/623339-netanyahu-macron-france-antisemitism/

This guy is pure fucking evil!! If that is antisemitic, then I’m damn proud of it. Netanyahu is a poster child for antisemitism .

Why doesn’t Trump and idiot wife write a letter to this scumbag about the children of Gaza. History will not take kindly to the inaction of the US, Europe or Russia to stop Israel and this cretin

August 20, 2025

Obama's NATO Ambassador Admits to British Lords: Trump Just Ended 80 Years of Global Control

Promethean Updates

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Get our FREE newsletter at https://www.PrometheanAction.com — In this episode, Susan Kokinda from Promethean Action reveals crucial insights into the recent shift in US foreign and economic policy under President Donald Trump. Highlighting the testimony of Ivo Daalder, former NATO ambassador, before the British House of Lords, Kokinda discusses how Trump's administration is challenging the post-war rules-based order that has guided Western policies for decades. The video outlines Trump's success in resolving global conflicts, reestablishing national economic sovereignty, and dismantling the strategies of imperial global elites. Subscribe for a deeper understanding of these monumental developments and their global repercussions.

January 21, 2023
More Leftie Than Thou
"Jacobin" Magazine Celebrates A Strike Against Ol' Blue Eyes

Here at "The Gaggle" we have very little time for the "more Leftie than thou" school of thought--that's the approach to life according to which the only thing that matters is whether you take the right position on every issue under the sun from Abortion to Zelensky. No one in the world meets the exacting standards of this school of thought; any Leftie leader anywhere is always selling out to the bankers and the capitalists. The perfect exemplar of this is the unreadable Jacobin magazine. 

The other day I came across this article from 2021. It's a celebration of trade union power. And not simply trade union power, but the use of trade union power to secure political goals. Of course (and this is always the case with the "more Leftie than thou" crowd), this glorious, never-to-be-forgotten moment on the history of organized labor took place many years ago--in the summer of 1974 to be exact. Yes, almost half a century has gone by since that thrilling moment when the working-class movement of Australia mobilized and prepared to seize the means of production, distribution and exchange. 

Well, not quite. Organized labor went into action against...Ol' Blue Eyes, the Chairman of the Board, the Voice; yes, Frank Sinatra. Why? What had Sinatra done? Sinatra was certainly very rich, and he owned a variety of properties and businesses. But if the Australian trade union movement were, understandably, searching for the bright, incandescent spark that would finally awaken the working class from its slumber there were surely richer, greedier, more dishonest, more decadent, above all more Australian individuals it could have discovered. Australia was never short of them. Rupert Murdoch immediately springs to mind. Why Sinatra?

 

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