Box Set Deep-Dive, Carl Nielsen’s Brave New World

There are two major orchestras with ‘Danish’ in their titles, and it’s as well to start by explaining which is which. The history of the Royal Danish Orchestra featured here reaches as far back as 1448, making it the world’s oldest orchestra. The Danish composer Carl Nielsen (1865-1931) played among the second violins for some sixteen years, a hugely influential experience that helped shape his development, both as a player and as a symphonic composer.

It was the RDO that first brought these extraordinary masterpieces to the listening public’s attention, though it was Denmark’s ‘other’ great orchestra, the Danish National Symphony - the principal orchestra of DR (Danish Broadcasting Corporation, founded in 1925) – that made this repertoire famous on record. Herbert Blomstedt (the first conductor to have the formal title of Principal Conductor with the Orchestra) recorded the symphonies in the 1970s for Warner Classics and Michael Schønwandt’s set from the 1990s is out on Naxos, while Danacord has an historic mono cycle in its catalogue led by three different conductors.

Thomas Søndergard held a position as timpanist with the RDO, and his subsequent conducting triumphs with orchestras worldwide (including the RDO) testify to his immense energy and intelligence. He’s the perfect musician to set our cycle in motion with an energetic performance of an especially fresh sounding Symphony, Nielsen’s First (recorded 2022), music that the composer wrote in 1891-1892 and dedicated to his wife. Johan Svendsen conducted the RDO in the 1894 premiere.

Many commentators (including me) rate Fabio Luisi’s recent DNSO cycle for Deutsche Grammophon top of current recommendations. For a single-conductor survey I shan’t budge from that assessment: it has a spontaneity about it and a sense of immediacy that others don’t quite match, not even those quoted above. But this handsomely produced and expertly annotated RDO collection (thank you Andrew Mellor) includes a number of fire-cracking performances that resist eclipse.

The German conductor Michael Boder, who died on 7th April this year aged 65 and conducts the electrifying (and superbly recorded) account of the Fifth Symphony (1922) included here, has been described by Luisi as ‘a kind person and a serious, no-frills conductor’. Boder was both conductor and Artistic Adviser with the Royal Danish Theatre and Orchestra from 2012-2016, and ‘no frills’ just about sums up his uncompromising 2015 RDO account of Nielsen’s symphonic masterpiece.

The menacing savagery that dominates the opening section of the first movement, with its ominously insistent snare drum, anticipates the oppressive marching music in Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7. Where is Nielsen taking us? The arrival of the noble, verdant Adagio non troppo section alludes to more peaceful climes before the shocking return of the snare drummer (on track 2) who is instructed to improvise "as if at all costs wanting to stop the progress of the orchestra". If you’ve never heard this music before, its effect approximates terror inflicted by invading forces as if out of nowhere. There’s nothing else in the symphonic repertoire quite like it.

Boder’s tempi are in general slow, whereas for the first movement of his famous May 1965 Sony Classical recording of Nielsen’s Third (the 'Sinfonia Espansiva' from 1910-1911) Leonard Bernstein takes us for a heady merry-go-round that come the mid-way point anticipates the world of Richard Rodgers’ sCarousel Waltz. Its arrival is as exhilarating as the Fifth’s warring snare drummer is terrifying. The Third Symphony is unique in Nielsen’s symphonic output for having vocal parts, specifically wordless solos for soprano and baritone in the second movement, whereas the 'Inextinguishable' (Fourth) Symphony (1916) is dominated by two sets of timpani in duet from either side of the orchestra - representing, in Nielsen’s words, ‘the elemental will to live’. More than a dozen recordings of this uplifting work are currently available, but none that I can think of matches Sir Simon Rattle’s dazzling RDO relay from February 2013 for drama and intensity.

Between 1901 and 1902 Nielsen sketched his Second Symphony, ‘The Four Temperaments’, with movements ‘The Choleric’, ‘The Sanguine’, ‘The Melancholic’ and ‘The Phlegmatic’: music that has an immediate appeal, the ‘choleric’ opening courageous and bracing, the ‘sanguine’ finale fearlessly confident, and at the heart of the work, the stolid, richly scored ‘phlegmatic’ second movement. Alexander Vedernikov, who was taken from us in October 2020 by COVID19 at the age of 56, was Chief Conductor of the Royal Danish Opera at the time of his death. His leadership of Nielsen 2 just a month before he died is authoritative and heart-warming.

From the same concert, Nielsen’s provocative Clarinet Concerto (1928) is a war between tonalities. As with the Fifth Symphony a snare drum plays a key role. The Concerto is presented as a single movement, with four distinct thematic groups. Clarinettist John Kruse makes hay and pokes fun in response to Nielsen’s outrageous writing. And from Paavo Berglund comes an involving 1989 performance of Nielsen’s last symphony, the Sixth (1928), a humbling mix of humour (trombone glissandi, oddball fanfares and percussion and the finale’s interrupted waltz), melancholy and invention. If you’re as yet unfamiliar with Nielsen’s symphonic oeuvre, Naxos offer the ideal boarding point. A magnificent set.