Nielsen reviews

So many vocal tics and tricks are used in the making of Danish composer Line Tjørnhøj’s Vox Reportage that it can seem uncomfortably close to a virtuoso demonstration of the manifold noises top chamber choirs are capable of creating nowadays.

Carl Nielsen’s two late woodwind concertos are performed here by the Philharmonia Orchestra with its own principals, in live recordings (no applause) at the Royal Festival Hall in London. Both works were conceived as portraits of their first soloists. Samuel Coles neatly personifies the fastidious Gilbert Jespersen, maintaining elegance and integrity in response to the intrusions of the orchestra, including a particularly obnoxious bass trombone.

The Halvorsen Violin Concerto from 1908 is the rarity here – thought to have been destroyed, it surfaced only in 2015. It has the all hallmarks of a violinist-composer’s work: arresting opening cadenzas, virtuoso athletics and the opportunity to draw sweetly melodic lines. Henning Kraggerud plays with a sense of lithe buoyancy in the faster music, although his double stops are not always infallible. But he has a wide tonal palette, and the languorous slow movement, with its echoes of Bruch, is emotionally charged.

Like Philippe Bernold on his new recording (review above), Juliette Bausor pairs Mozart’s First Flute Concerto with the Andante in C, adding the Rondo (K373) for afters. Bausor – principal flute in the London Philharmonic Orchestra and London Mozart Players, and member of Ensemble 360 – is more expansive than Bernold; she takes almost half a minute more than her French counterpart in the first movement of the concerto, and another 15 seconds in the third. Conversely, Bausor’s Adagio movement, is significantly faster than the Aparté recording.

With the exception of the Nielsen, it would be easy to mistake these as slight pieces, salon sweetmeats. Or you could make the other mistake of trying too earnestly to bring out real, or imagined depths beneath the charming surface, and in doing so lose the charm. Latvian musicians Baiba and Lauma Skride do neither. I’ve never heard the opening of Grieg’s Second Sonata sound so gorgeously, openly melancholic, but the way it eases into the smiling folk-inflected allegro that follows is wonderfully natural.

Two irresistible, dancing Nielsen suites, the idyllic Springtime in Fünen and the exotic, rumbustious Aladdin, in fine 1983 Unicorn recordings, plus his Three Motets directed by their dedicatee Mogens Wøldike.

Michael Scott Rohan

Rich in characteristically melodious and involving music, Nielsen’s first opera has never yet been as popular as his effervescent comedy Maskarade. This is the first commercial video of Saul and David, and it’s pretty good. Michael Schønwandt’s expansive conducting conveys its epic scale and lyrical sweep more naturally than his recent CD of Maskarade. David Pountney, who made a sorry hash of Maskarade at Bregenz, handles Einar Christiansen’s potentially stiff tragedy much more tellingly.

It’s fascinating to hear Carl Nielsen’s six symphonies in quick succession. They all sound like manifestations of the same volatile personality, but gaining in confidence in their radical rethinking of the concept of the symphony towards the Fifth, a masterpiece of the 20th century, and with the enigmatic Sixth as coda.

Nielsen’s second and finest opera, adapted from an 18th-century play by Baron Ludwig Holberg, is a cheerful comedy about youth and freedom, set against the fashion for masquerades – masked balls at which all classes and backgrounds could mingle anonymously. The lyrical score bounces with dance rhythms, alongside more reflective moments like Act II’s twilit prelude, recalling Die Meistersinger with its recurring watchman, and the extraordinary memento mori end to the masquerade itself.

It was a bold move for the Danish label Dacapo to mark the 150th anniversary of its country’s greatest composer by allocating a new cycle of his six symphonies to an American orchestra and conductor. But it’s paid off, in a series of performances of high quality, which do justice to Nielsen’s mastery of the orchestra and unique musical personality.

Not only is Sakari Oramo utterly at home and in control in these two brilliant, at times startlingly variegated works, he draws them closer together than I would have previously thought possible. Each of the ‘Four Temperaments’ depicted in the Second Symphony comes alive with thrilling or beguiling conviction, but the majestic symphonic cohesion (not obvious in every performance) means one can hear the whole work as a single statement. It’s as though Nielsen is saying, ‘All these emotional states are me’.

These two gifted Scandinavians, cellist Andreas Brantelid and pianist Christian Ihle Hadland, have created a genuinely fresh programme for Grieg’s Cello Sonata, delivering it with buoyant spirit and imaginative freedom. Brantelid plays one of the great Strad cellos, the ‘Boni, Hegar’, which yields sumptuously to his impulsive – occasionally reckless – big-scale vision. Hadland, more familiar as a Radio 3 New Generation artist, matches him in fantasy, subtlety and sheer emotional engagement.

It’s a joy to find so much intelligent care and attention expended on Nielsen’s First Symphony. When it is recorded at all, you often get the impression that the conductor has pigeonholed it as ‘promising’ and opted to focus on the usually better-known coupling. But the critic who described Nielsen’s First as ‘a child playing with dynamite’ got the lively paradox at the heart of this music just right. And so too does Sakari Oramo.

It has taken a long time to get to this point, but it does seem that conductors in general have a much better understanding of how Nielsen’s music should ‘go’. Nielsen himself said that his music had ‘a certain current’, and if you didn’t get that, you might as well pack up and go home. In fact there’s much more to his music than that, but performances of these two symphonies like those of Colin Davies on LSO Live show that if you can plug into what the composer called ‘the elemental will to life’, then so much else falls into place.