Wilhelm Stenhammar - Piano Concerto No. 1; Fragment from Symphony No. 3

"'Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor for Piano and Orchestra': In the spring of 1882 Stockholm was visited by the famous pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow. He describes his impressions in his Scandinavian travel memoirs, recounting how he had not met any composer of importance, but the Orchestra of the Royal opera - that is, the orchestra of the Stockholm Opera - was very good and had a tremendously enthusiastic audience. He asks whether there might possibly be a conncetion between 'the quite extraordinary receptiveness of the Swedes' and their 'sterility in the realm of music'.

"Just over a decade later he would have obtained quite a different picture. There now existed a young and very enthusiastic generation of both composers and performers, and there new, fascinating works which held great promise for the future.

"Wilhelm Stenhammar's Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, first performed at one of the Royal Opera symphony concerts on 17 March 1894, stands out as a gateway - or fanfare - to this new epoch in Swedish music. The soloist was the composer himself, at that time 22 years old, and the performance was conducted by Conrad Nordqvist, the Director of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera. A fortnight later the concerto was performed in Copenhagen. The success brought Stenhammar both a publisher and an agent. The door to 'the great wide world' was no opened. Before long Stenhammar was playing his concerto in Berlin, with Richard Strauss conducting, and later with Arthur Nikisch, Karl Muck, Felix Weingartner and Hans Richter. No Swedish instrumental composition had ever before attracted such widespread attention.

"The spring of 1904 found Stenhammar sketching a new piano concerto, in D minor. Completed in Florence in the spring of 1907, it became the only one of his own works which Stenhammar later performed himself. He played the B-flat minor Concerto for the last time in 1908; after that it figures only sporadically in the repertoire, and with other soloists. During the Second World War both the score and the parts - all in manuscript - were in the possession of the Hainauer publishing form in Breslau, and the entire material was destroyed during one of the air raids on the city. Only the printed short score remained.

"When this became known, Stenhammar's widow ask the composer Kurt Atterberg, who as a young man had heard the concerto several times, to orchestrate the short score. This version of the B-flat minor Concerto was performed in the spring of 1946. It was recorded in the autumn of 1977 with Irene Mannheimer as soloist together with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Charles Dutoit.

"In the autumn of 1990, Professor Allan B. Ho of Southern Illinois University announced that he had found, in a private American collection of music, what proved to be a copy of Stenhammar's manuscript, produced for a tour of the USA by the German pianist Franz Rummel in 1898. As a result, the original classical-romantic orchestra sound can now be both listened to an studied. In comparison, Atterberg's predominantly stylish instrumentation occasionally reveals small personal touches, as if he wanted to put a signature to his own contribution.

"The B-flat minor Concerto is a work in the Brahmsian tradition, in four movements and lasting for about 47 minutes. It opens with a magnificent solo cadenz ('Molto moderato e maestoso') in a dialogue with chord from the orchestra. The broadly constructed movement which then follows ('Sostenuto e tranquillo - Animato') has a first theme which is elegiac and a second one which is enthusiastic and upward-soaring. At times the tonal language acquires symphonic proportions. The second movement - Scherzo ('Vivacissimo') - is light-hearted and buoyant, in a virtuoso style which rather puts on in mind of Saint-Saëns, a composer whose works were frequently performed in Stockholm during the 1890s. The third movement - 'Andante' - is based on a cantabile theme stated first by the horn. For most of this movement the piano simply provides an accompaniment. The final movement - 'Allegro commodo' - has a tempestuous main theme and relies very much of virtuoso effects, but towards the end these are curtailed by a ballad-like melody (on the same motif as in Stenhammar's song 'Lutad mot gärdet'). The concerto ends on a pianissimo chord.

"'Fragment from Symphony No. 3 (revised by Tommy B. Andersson)': In the mid 1910s Stenhammar had completed his two most important orchestral works: the Symphony in G minor and the Serenade in F major. These were to be his last compositions. However, between 1918 and 1919 he worked on a third symphony and there exist quite detailed outlines of a first movement - seven pages of which are in fair copy - and melodious suggestions as to an additional three movements.

"The short fragment from the work which has been recorded contains the above-mentioned seven pages. When compared with the polyphonic, almost matter-of-fact Symphony in G minor, the feeling from the outlines is of an orientation towards the romantic tone language we meet in some earlier works by Stenhammar.

"The outlines, with a concert ending by Tommy B. Andersson, were presented at a press conference in the Stockholm Concert Hall in April 1991." (Bo Wallner, 1992. From the liner notes.)

Performers: Kungliga Filharmonikerna, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Mats Widlund

1. Piano Concerto No. 1 In B-Flat Minor: I. Molto Moderato E Maestoso - Sostenuto E Tranquillo - Animato

2. Piano Concerto No. 1 In B-Flat Minor: II. Scherzo (Vivacissimo)

3. Piano Concerto No. 1 In B-Flat Minor: III. Andante

4. Piano Concerto No. 1 In B-Flat Minor: IV. Allegro Commodo

5. Fragment From Symphony No. 3

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Carl Nielsen - Symphonies Nos. 4 & 5

"Despite being born in the same year, Nielsen and Sibelius, the twin peaks of Nordic symphonism, pursued wholly independent paths. Where Sibelius's First Symphony (1899, rev. 1900) took Borodin and Tchaikovsky as its starting point, Nielsen's (1891-94) paid homage to Berlioz, Grieg and Svendsen. And while Sibelius gradually stripped away elements of Romanticism and went ever deeper into elemental representations of Nature and movement, Nielsen accumulated, explored ever wider horizones, and rather than moving away from his roots made symphonic dramas from confronting them with new, often inimical forces.

"The Dane's Third Symphony (1911) celebrated a conglomeration of positive values - freedom, creative energy, oneness with Nature, and, in the finale, what Nielsen himself dubbed the 'healthy morale' of the ordinary working man - all under the umbrella title of 'Sinfonia espansiva'. At its core, his next symphony, 'The Inextinguishable' (1914-16) is a defence of those same values against elements that threaten their very existence. By the time of its composition, Europe was being torn apart by a war in which Denmark remained neutral but which caused Nielsen to question the 'national feeling' he had previously regarded as wholesome and which he now likened to a 'kind of spiritual syphilis'. There were conflicts, too, in his personal life. His marriage, to the prominent sculptress Ann-Marie Brodersen, was entireing a period of turmoil, brought about by the revelation of his infidelities; and on 30th May 1914 he resigned his position as assistant conductor at the Royal Opera in Copenhagen, thereby becoming a freelance musician for more or less the first time in over twenty years. For all these reasons Nielsen felt compelled to re-examine his values as a composer and human being, and in this respect 'The Inextinguishable' is a classic mid-life-crisis piece.

"On 3rd May 1914, Carl Nielsen wrote in a state of high agitation to his wife: 'I have an idea for a new work, which has no programme but which is meant to express what we understand by the life-urge or life-manifestation; that's to say: everything that moves, that craves life, that can be called neither good nor evil, neither high nor low, neither great nor small, but simply: 'That which is life' or 'That which craves life' - I mean, no definite idea about anything 'grandiose' or 'fine and delicate' or about warm or cold (powerful maybe) but simply Life and Movement, but varied, very varied, but holding together, and as though always flowing in one large movement, in a single stream. I need a word or a short title to say it all.'

"The word he was looking for was 'Inextinguishable'. But he was not to find it until he had completed the symphony nearly two years after that semi-coherent outburst of enthusiasm. His thoughts crystallised in a short preface to the score: 'With the title 'The Inextinguishable' the composer has sought to indicate in one word what only music has the power to express in full: 'The Elemental Will of Life'. Music -is- Life and, like it, inextinguishable.' And in 1920 Nielsen sent his Dutch composer-conductor friend Julius Röntgen an explanatory note that further clarified his intentions: 'If the whole world was destroyed, Nature would once again begin to beget new life and push forward with the strong and fine forces that are to be found in the very stuff of existence... These 'inextinguishable' forces are what I have tried to represent.'

"In Danish 'Det Uudslukkelige' is a neuter noun, non an adjectival description. So we should think of this not as a hubristic Inextinguishable Symphony, but rather as one whose subject matter is That which is Inextinguishable. Nielsen might almost as well have named it the Life Force, as Bernard Shaw put it, or 'élan vital', in a formulation popularised around the time of its composition by the philosopher Henri Bergson.

"The turbulence of the opening bars immediately suggests how much is at stake, as the strings and woodwin view with one another and brass and timpani strive to maintain law and order. When this tumult subsides, a long-drawn clarinet theme in winding Sibelian thirds seems to come from another world ('not quite like me', as once Nielsen remarked). Rather than remaining merely a haven for escapist reverie, this theme will prove highly adaptable, marking out its Darwinian fitness for eventual survival.

"In the pastoral-idyllic slow movement the woodwind behave as an idealised village band, charmingly not quite sure whether they should be playing two or three beats to the bar. Here, one senses, are the values of simplicity and openness the symphony needs to defend. The tensely dramatic third movement then begins with a passionate accompanied recitative for the violins, soaring over timpani and lower strings, 'like an eagle on the wind' according to the composer; succeeding contrasts between passionate declamation and hymn-like serenity are eventually swallowed up in a radiant climax. In the finale, launched by a torrent of string scales in the manner of Beethoven's third 'Leonora' Overture, the element of antagonism resurfaces. Two sets of timpani, spatially separated, battle it out with the rest of the orchestra, before the triumphant return of the first movement's Sibelian clarinet theme, no blazened across the entire orchestra in searing affirmation.

"After its enthusiastically received première on 1st February 1916, 'The Inextinguishable' rapidly established itself as a milestone in the Nordic symphonic repertoire, one that was frequently called upon to conduct. During these years he was living an itinerant life, hoping to re-cement his marriage but for the time being excluded from the family home in Copenhagen. In between major symphonic projects, much of his energy was devoted to a lavish staging of 'Aladdin', which demanded some 90 minutes of incidental music, and his representation of its polarities of Good and Evil, as well as its oriental setting, gave him new impetus for symphonic explorations (witness the music for 'The Market at Ispahan', which he composed for four discrete mini-orchestras in four different keys).

"For the 'Fifth Symphony' we have no preliminary statements of the kind Nielsen wrestly with apropos 'The Inextinguishable'. But he did reflect with hindsight on its content. Interviews for a Copenhagen newspaper just before the première on 24th January 1922, he was asked about the meaning of his new work. Using terms echoed by composers down the ages, he responded cagily: 'Long explanations and indications as to what music 'represents' are just evil; they distract the listener.' Pressed as to whether the Great War had affected his composition, he again deflected the question, replying that although he was not conscious of any such influence, 'One thing is certain: not one of us is the same as we were before the war. So maybe so!'

"As so many composers have discovered, these evasive tactics left the Fifth Symphony defenceless against critics eager to supply their own interpretations. Some related the extraordinarily vivid drama of the piece to his music for 'Aladdin', hearing pastoral dream-world and Arabian marches in the first movement of the symphony. And one of Nielsen's staunchest supporters found himself thoroughly repelled, calling the work a 'Sinfonie filmatique', this dirty trenches-music [...] this clenched first in the face of a defenceless, novelty snobbish, titillation-sick public [...] who lovingly lick the hand stained with the blood of their own noses!' Two years later in Stockholm, a large section of the audience walked out, in protest at the cacophony of the first movement, while a proportion of the remainder tried to hiss down the performance.

"Few among those early listeners could have guessed that Nielsen's Fifth Symphony would one day mark his posthumous international breakthrough - which can be dated quite precisely to the 1950 Edinburgh Festival - and go on to be hailed as one of the greatest symphonies of the twentieth century (not least by the celebrated Mahler scholar and broadcaster Deryck Cooke).

"Nielsen did in fact leave a few more sporadic clues as to his preoccupations while composing the work. These all have to do with primordial oppositions. At the end of his pencil draft score he wrote the motto: 'Dark, resting forces - Awakened forces', which could apply equally well to the contrast between the two main sections of the first movement and to that between the two movements themselves. He told a confidant that it was 'something very primitive I wanted to express: the division of dark and light, the battle between evil and good. A title such as 'Dreams and Deeds' could maybe sum up the inner picture I had in front of my eyes when composing.' And to his newspaper interviewer he explained that the symphony was ultimately concerned with the same elemental opposition as in his previous three, namely 'resting forces in contrast to active ones'.

"If 'The Inextinguishable' enshrined a conflict between Nielsen's essentially positive outlook on life and fearsome odds stacked against it, the Fifth Symphony revisits this arena with an even more comprehensive symphonic mastery.

"The first movement falls into two large sections. Nielsen's 'resting forces' express themselves initially as a kind of wandering indifference. He once described this state as 'Vegetative Nature', and the title 'Vegetative' actually stands at the head of his pencil draft score. Pairs of bassoons, and later horns, flutes and clarinets, drift aimlessly around an oscillating viola line that waits at first passively, then more anxiously, for something to happen. That line reacts to shivers on the cymbal as the wandering melody transfers to strings. An increasing sense of foreboding is registered by harsh accents in the cellos, and a kind of paralysis gradually steals over the music. The stage is set for the entrance of the side drum. From this point the struggle between conflicting forces ebbs and flows, eventually reaching stalemate and dying away under stabbing repeated notes on violins and celesta.

"As if waking from a bad dream, a warm G major tune breaks in on violas and cellos, supported by bassoons and horns. This unfolds in two glorious waves of increasingly contrapuntal activity, reaching an ecstatic climax. However, what promises to be a similarly positive third wave is soon clutched by fearful reminisces, and a mounting sense of alarm takes over. Woodwind and strings hurl what Nielsen called the 'evil motif' - a transformation of the violas' wave line - at one another, and at the high point the side drum returns at an unrelated faster tempo, with the instruction to disturb the orchestra at all costs. Pandemonium ensues, until a tidal wave of G major engulfs all the combatants and a battle-scarred tranquility concludes the first movement.

"The second movement begins with what the pioneering Nielsen scholar Robert Simpson aptly called 'a fount of regenerative energy'. At first this music seems to be irresistable in its onward sweep, but eventually it too succumbs to a terrifying loss of energy. That this has happened without the presence of the first movement's obvious tokens of ill-will - such as the percussion, the skirling clarinet and the dinning side drum - is all the more disheartening. The implication is that an even greater effort of will-power than in the first movement will be needed in order to regain a positive frame of mind.

"Nielsen's strategy is first of all to let evil forces rip, which he does in a fugue from hell that starts quietly on the violins but soon develops a nightmarish momentum and eventually blows itself to smithereens. The air having finally been cleared, another fugue begins, again on the violins but this time slowly and calmly transofrming the opening theme of the second movement and thinking its way through to enlightenment. It only remains for the 'fount of energy' to return and to find a way to avoid its previous path to ruin. This having been achieved, along with the revelation of the key of E flat major (also the key of the magnificent conclusion to the recent Fifth Symphony by Nielsen's Finnish neighbour, Sibelius) the final pages hold the banner of the Life Force triumphantly aloft. (David Fanning, 2013. From the liner notes.)

Performers: Kungliga Filharmonikerna, Sakari Oramo

1. Symphony No. 4, Op. 29, FS 76 'Det Uudslukkelige': I. Allegro –

2. Symphony No. 4, Op. 29, FS 76 'Det Uudslukkelige': II. Poco Allegretto –

3. Symphony No. 4, Op. 29, FS 76 'Det Uudslukkelige': III. Poco Adagio Quasi Andante –

4. Symphony No. 4, Op. 29, FS 76 'Det Uudslukkelige': IV. Allegro

5. Symphony No. 5, Op. 50 FS 97: I. Tempo Giusto –

6. Symphony No. 5, Op. 50 FS 97: II. Allegro – Presto – Andante Un Poco Tranquillo – Allegro

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Carl Nielsen - Symphonies Nos. 2 & 6

"Nielsen was one of life's people watchers. From the time of his rustic upbringing on the island of Funen he was a talented mimic (a gift he seems to have inherited from his father), and he became known as a marvellous conversationalist and raconteur. His compulsive interest in all that was robust and healthy in human nature, no matter if that meant rough edges or strongly differing views from his own, also inspired him to some of his finest music.

"No single work exemplifies Nielsen's gift for musical empathy morte thrillingly than his 'Second Symphony'. It dates from 1902-02, a time when he was earning his living mainly as a somewhat frustrated second violinist in the orchestra of the Royal Opera in Copenhagen. The origins of the work, as he explained in a programme note near the end of his life, were in an allegorical picture he came across in a country inn, illustrating the Four Temperaments - the moods determined by the mixture of fluids in the body, at least according to medical theory with roots in the Ancient Greeks and Romans and still commonly believed up to the early 1800s. Imbalance between these fluids could supposedly create a disposition towards anger (choler), apathy (phlegm), sadness (melancholy) or carefree abandon (sanguinity). The comically exaggerated visual images of those characteristics apparently stayed with Nielsen and he soon saw their potential to map on the four movements of the traditional symphony.

"In the painting the Choleric temperament was apparently shown as a swash-buckling horse-rider: 'his eyes were bulging out of his head, his hair streamed wildly around his face, so distorted with rage and diabolical hatred that I could not help bursting out laughing'. Nielsen's symphonic equivalent is no laughing matter, however. A fiery Berliozian 'allegro', marked from the outset by slashing off-beat accents and rushing scale passages, its lyrical contrasts are like episodes in which the main character regrets his wildness without being able to prevent its return. Something close to this scenario would serve Nielsen again a quarter of a century later as the basis for his Clarinet Concerto.

"In complete contrast, the second movement, the Phlegmatic, is so easy-paced that it nearly falls asleep: 'I visualized a young fellow whose real inclination was to lie where the birds sing, where the fish glide noiselessly through the water, where the sun warms and the wind strokes mildly round one's curls.' Anyone who knows Nielsen's genial autobiography, 'My Childhood on Funen', will realise how close such an image was to his own nature, or at least to one part of it. In this movement, especially in the lazy undulating triads of the middle section, is contained the seed for the kind of inertia that would eventually take on a very different aspect: as a life-threatening - indeed life-on-earth-threatening - force in Nielsen's later symphonies.

"Next comes the Melancholic temperament, which like the Phlegmatic has little by way of contrast in its personality, other than a gravely beautiful, resigned episode in the middle. Again like its Phlegmatic counterpart, the movement becomes increasingly static, until, in the composer's words 'the parts intertwine like the threads of a net'. Even so, Nielsen was incapable of drawing anything other than a rounded character-portrait, and he give his 'heavy, melancholy man' a mitigating quality of stoical nobility from the outset. Eventually the music find its way to a calm and touching self-knowledge.

"Psychological progress of some such kind also underpins the Sanguine finale. This begins as the sketch of a man who 'storms thoughtlessly on in the belief that the whole world belongs to him, and that roast pigeons will fly into his mouth without work or bother'. However, 'Just once it seems that he has encountered something really serious; at least he meditates over something that is alien to his own nature, and it seems to affect him, so that while the final march may be happy and bright, it is still more dignified and not as silly and smug as some his previous bursts of activity.' In musical terms this is where Nielsen's famous 'progressive tonality' kicks in, as the movement - and indeed the entire symphony - ends in a brighter key than the one in which it began, as if to symbolise that adventure and self-transformation may be even higher values than empathy.

"In the post-Great War era, Nielsen's Fourth and Fifth Symphonies brought him the greatest measure of professional recognition he ever enjoyed in his lifetime. Critics in Scandinavia who had been troubled by what they saw as a veil of wilful experimentation in his earlier works were now, paradoxically, bowled over by these far more challenging masterpieces. Perhaps they got the point - and perhaps Nielsen himself made it easier for them to get the point - that what they had been bothered about was actually a deliberate negative polarity in an abstract human drama, rather than any kind of weakness or 'Schadenfreude'. Music of tough-minded, recalcitrant, even rebarbative kind was simply Nielsen's way of enshrining the struggles he perceived to be at the core of existence. Given what the First World War had done for the moral climate in Europe, that message was no hard to mistake.

"However, for the composer himself, the edge was taken off his creative triumphs by the realisation that he was not making the international headway he felt he deserved. He found little to admire in the European musical scene in the 1920s, with its extremes of hedonism and self-abnegation. And to make matters worse, his health was being undermined by heart problems that first manifested themselves seriously after his intense work on the Fifth Symphony. In any case, his abiding instinct for adventure dictated that his next symphony would have to move to a different arena. But where to, precisely, given that he had so recently scaled such mighty peaks?

"His first thought was, in effect, to take his cue from the work he had been doing for more than a decade in the area of folk-popular song. Accordingly, as he wrote to one of his daughters in August 1924, he envisaged a work that would be 'quite idyllic in character, beyond all time-bound taste and fashion... like the old 'a cappella' musicians'. But Nielsen was never one for planning out the precise route in advance, and this time his journey took him to regions far removed from the opening bars, with their tinkling glockenspiel, genial woodwind scales and childlike violins over tick-tock oboes and bassoons.

"In an intervew published two days before the first performance on 11th December 1925, he was asked about the title of the symphony. 'I've named it 'Sinfonia semplice',' he replied, 'because the main character is in a lighter vein than my other symphonies - there are merry things in it.' The interviewer pressed him further, no doubt because the composer had been in the news that year: at the time of the national celebrations for his 60th birthday, he had made unexpectedly cynical pronouncements on the career of a composer. Nielsen was adamant: 'The symphony has nothing whatsoever to do with my states of mind. What I experience in life never directly affects my music.' But he went on to give what may be an important clue to the tone of the symphony: 'It's natural for us to long for what we don't have.' In other words, the 'Sinfonia semplice' is not so much a simple symphony - far from it - but rather one that longs for a state of simplicity, more particularly for a return to the state of its opening bars.

"The symphony's final movement is, in fact, one of Nielsen's most tragic and full-worked out musical dramas, for all that it is expressed in a twelve-minute time-span and in highly economical texture. Each of its half-dozen main ideas is beguilingly innocent on initial presentation, but each is brutalised in the central phase of the movement, culminating in a full-scale panic attack and an agonisingly prolonged dissonance on horns and woodwin. This is, in effect, as anti-heroic a symphonic movement as anything in Shostakovich - who was composing his First Symphony at precisely the same time, but who almost certainly did not know Nielsen's music until much later in life.

"If this first movement is disturbing, what follows is even more so. A self-styled Humoresque, the second movement's prevailing tone is sardonic, yet not so obviously so that Nielsen felt it could speak for itself. In one and the same interview, two days before the premier in December 1925, he stressed that the symphony protrayed 'purely musical problems', yet then immediately contradicted himself, describing the percussion waking up the other instrumnts, which proceed to play 'modern music', arousing their distaste and later the contempt of the trombone, which plays yawning glissandi, as if to say 'Baa, baby food!', before the all fall peacefully asleep again. What is alarming about this satirical picture is a sense that the composer's own voice is virtually absent, having been so integral to the drama of the first movement.

"Then it seems that the slow movement may redress the balance. Nielsen's 'serious proposition' is an intense Bartókian fugue in the strings - the opening repeated notes harking right back to the first bar of the symphony. This is the sort of writing he had deployed so inspiringly in the second movement of the Fifth Symphony, to absorb negativity and to prepare the ground for a final burst of life-affirmation. This time, however, everything collapses and the music becomes entangled in a mesh of its own fevered anxiety - like the Melancholic Temperament but at a higher, existential level. The best it can hope for is a pale reconciliation to the status quo, blearily expressed in the closing bars.

"Before composing the finale Nielsen declared it would be a 'a variations work, a cosmic chasos, who atoms [...] clarify and unite to form a globe'. Yet again, however, the concept darkened as he worked on it. The variations are certainly there, and in the middle of the movement something very much like cosmic chaos indeed comes across the music. But the envisaged gathering into wholeness encounters obstacles that for once in his symphonic career prove insuperable. As the composer confided to a friend, the bizarre variation with tuba and percussion represents 'death knocking at the door', and the concluding fanfares therefore cannot be other than a death-defying gesture. Finally the two bassoons are left honking out their lowest note with all their might. Thus the greatest life-affirmer in the 20th-century symphonic tradition ends his last symphony by symbolically giving death the finger." (David Fanning, 2014. From the liner notes.) 

Performers: Kungliga Filharmonikerna, Sakari Oramo

1. Symphony No. 2, Op. 16, FS 29 'De Fire Temperamenter': I. Allegro Colleric

2. Symphony No. 2, Op. 16, FS 29 'De Fire Temperamenter': II. Allegro Comodo E Flemmatico

3. Symphony No. 2, Op. 16, FS 29 'De Fire Temperamenter': III. Andante Malincolico

4. Symphony No. 2, Op. 16, FS 29 'De Fire Temperamenter': IV. Allegro Sanguineo

5. Symphony No. 6, FS 116 'Sinfonia Semplice': I. Tempo Giusto

6. Symphony No. 6, FS 116 'Sinfonia Semplice': II. Humoresque. Allegretto

7. Symphony No. 6, FS 116 'Sinfonia Semplice': III. Proposta Seria. Adagio

8. Symphony No. 6, FS 116 'Sinfonia Semplice': IV. Theme And Variations. Allegro

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Carl Nielsen - Symphonies Nos. 1 & 3

"Nielsen's childhood, so eloquently evoked in the memoirs he published after his 60th birthday, played a formative role in his musical personality on many levels. It gave him enduring respect for the values of ordinary country folk, delight in the endless variety of nature and relish for the inner strength of his early musical loves, Bach and Mozart. Later, his training at the Royal Conservatoire in Copenhagen, principally as a violinist, nurtured his early compositional efforts, especially in the fields of chamber music and song.

"But so far as larger forms such as the symphony are concerned, it was his employment in the Royal Opera Orchestra from 1889 that gave him the material basis and his scholarship-funded travels in Europe from 1890-91 that provided the decisive inspiration. In the course of that study-trip he began to sense the kind of orchestral music he wanted to write (emulating the likes of Beethoven and Brahms) and also the kind he didn't (essentially anything that smacked of self-indulgence of gratuitous effect).

"Two 'upbeats' preceded the symphony he finally set to work on in the summer of 1891. One was a complete symphonic first movement, composed in 1888 and named (not by Nielsen himself, it seems) 'Symphonic Rhapsody', for its delayed first performance. Despite its athletic, swinging triple-time motion, which was to become a hallmark of several of his mature symphonies, he agreed with some of the critics that this piece was not strong enough to stand alone, and he made no more than a concept - but an ambitious one - for a symphony with the programme 'From earth you have come; to earth you shall return'.

"Nielsen's definitive 'First Symphony', which took shape over a period of two and a half years, is far removed from such grandiose ambitions, or indeed from any kind of programme (he was highly amused when a well-meaning lady interpreted his idiosyncratic designation for the first movement, 'orgoglioso' - 'proudly' - as meaning 'organ-like'). Thoroughly classical in its proportions and discipline, the work owes much to the benchmark of Schumann, widely adopted by symphonists all over Europe at the time. At the same time it displays affinities with the fieriness of Berlioz - the very opening bars are a close cousin to the 'Orgy of the Brigands' from the Frenchman's 'Harold in Italy' Symphony, also with the lyrical tone of Grieg, and with the rhythmic vitality of Grieg's fellow-Norwegian Johan Svendsen, who conducted the première on 14th March 1894.

"In his review of that performance, Charles Kjerulf, the most influential Danish critic of the time, summed up the symphony's character as 'a child playing with dynamite'. The dynamite is perhaps most clearly to be found in the compact, propulsive rhythmical units of the first movement, which carry something close to a Beethovian generative force. In fact Nielsen had recently been so impressed with Beethoven's Fifth that he had set himself the task of writing out its first movement from memory, in full score. The childlike quality surfaces especially at movements when the pace slackens and pastoral relaxation takes over, as it does most obviously in the second movement - a deeply felt 'Andante', but one that conveys a sense of wonder at the beauty of the world, rather than projecting individualistic soul-states.

"Next comes a scherzo-substitute, somewhat Brahmsian in its initially easy-going character, though as it proceeds the tone darkens. In fact, this third movement functions as a kind of crucible, in which the symphony's musical constituents are as it were melted down and reshaped, with implications not only for the dramatic contrasts in the middle of the movement but also for the ultimate destination of the finale.

"Nominally in G minor, the symphony might have concluded quite conventionally in G major, or even placed the entire last movement entirely in that key. In fact Nielsen's finale works round to a coda in C major, making this possibly the first ever symphony to end in a key other than its home tonic. This phenomenon generally known as 'progressive tonality', is not something Nielsen worked out with scientific precision - though with hindsight the destination tonality reflects harmonic relationships subtly implanted earlier in the work, all the way back to its opening chord. Rather, it is the technical manifestation of a sense of adventure and a refusal to be tied down that are there for all to hear and that would lead Nielsen into all sort of mould-breaking advnetures in his later symphonies.

"In 1906, at the halfway point between his Second and Third Symphonies, Nielsen scored a national triumph with his comic opera 'Maskarade' - an immensely tuneful and heart-warming score that soon came to be recognized as the Danish national opera 'par excellence'. Then in December the following year his song 'Jens vejmand' ('Jens the Road-mender') suddenly became a smash hit after its first public performance. Nielsen had already resigned his post as second violinist in the Royal Opera Orchestra, and early in 1908 he was appointed assistant conductor, a post he would hold until June 1914.

"He was clearly coming into his prime as composer, performer and national icon, and his growing recognition brought with it increasingly regular commissions for incidental music and cantatas. There was even a measure of international success. In the autumn of 1906 the Chicago Symphony Orchestra udner Frederick Stock successfully performed his First Symphony. Interest in neighbouring Sweden and Norway was on the ride, and Nielsen gained an influential Czech supporter in the shape of the author Max Brod, who sang his praises in the German musical press and who perceptively noted an affinity - entirely coincidental - with his compatriot and friend Leoš Janáček.

"Curiously, Nielsen had very little contact with his symphonic opposite number and exact contemporary in Finland, Jean Sibelius. Nevertheless, not least among many significant musical impressions in these years was Sibelius's Second Symphony, whose influence may well be reflected in the long pedal-points and intense high string writing in the second movement of the 'Sinfonia espansiva'. Such ideas are one obvious aspect of 'expansiveness'. But Nielsen's idea with his unusual title is embodied above all in the character of the first movement.

"In later life Nielsen wrote three programme notes for the piece. The nearest he came to explaining his concept of the 'expansive' was in March 1931, seven months before his death: 'The first movement was meant as a burst of energy and life-affirmation thrown out into the wide world, which we humans not only desire to know in all its multifarious effects, but which we want to conquer and make our own.' To express that urge, Nielsen hit on a vigorous, muscular triple-time pulse that ultimately goes back to the first movement of Beethoven's 'Eroica', from where it passed down to him through Schumann's 'Rhenish' Symphony and Brahms's Third. Nielsen himself had adumbrated it in his 'Symphonic Rhapsody'. This kind of writing, with its highly arched thematic contours, its thrusting rhythms and propulsive harmony, gives the sensation of being composed as if in the future tense - always urgently looking forward. A significant operatic counterpart is the opening scene of Nielsen's biblical opera 'Saul and David', where exactly this musical character depicts the Israelites anxiously awaiting the delayed arrival of the prophet Samuel.

"In complete contrast to the phenomenal energy of the 'Allegro espansivo', the pastoral slow movement evokes the rolling countryside of Nielsen's native island of Funen. Here, in the concluding stages, vocalises for solo soprano and baritone are added to heighten the sense of lyrical ecstasy, expressed in a fragment of text found in Nielsen's draft score: 'All thoughts have vanished: I am lying beneath the heavens.' As he put it in one of his programme notes, the presence of the voices is 'only to highlight the peaceful atmosphere you might imagine in Paradise before the Fall'.

"In the third movement the opposed forces so far encountered are held in an uneasy balance, the moods being poised 'between dream and wakefulness', as a pupil of Nielsen put it in an analysis that came out - with the composer's approval - soon after the first published score. As so often with Nielsen, this stage of the symphony is something of a melting-pot, in which difficult issues are worked out - here notably in some convulsive fugal writing - that will enable the finale to consolidate, rather than having to fight all its battles from scratch.

"Originally headed 'pomposo' - which in Nielsen's understanding stood for grandeur but not self-aggrandisement - this finale is in fact a remarkable non-conflictual affair, at least by comparison with its counterparts in the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies. The music strides out, in the composer's words, as 'a hymn to work and the healthy enjoyment of daily life', in which the 'the orchestra sings its introductory theme in so commonplace a fashion that you might well call it 'healthy-popular''. The conclusion comes 'like a man who, uninterestingly [in the sense of undermonstratively], but healthily and at his ease, reaches the goal of his travels'.

"The première of the 'Sinfonia espansiva' took place in Copenhagen on 28th February 1912, in a concert that also included Nielsen's new Violin Concerto. The event was a triumph, not only delighting his uspporters but also winning over those Danish critics who had previously been sceptical of his abilities, and the symphony went on to enjoy many performances in different countries, often under the composer's own baton. Two months after the première, Nielsen conducted it in Amsterdam. During the most restful parts of the finale, he asked the famous Concertgebouw Orchestra to play as 'boringly' as possible, and he stretched lazily to make his point. The musicians immediately imitated his gesture, and everyone burst out laughing. 'Bravo, gentlemen,' said Nielsen. 'I see we understand eachother.' And the laughter resumed. (David Fanning, 2014. From the liner notes.)

Performers: Kungliga Filharmonikerna, Sakari Oramo

1. Symphony No. 1 In G Minor, Op. 7, FS 16: I. Allegro Orgoglioso

2. Symphony No. 1 In G minor, Op. 7, FS 16: II. Andante

3. Symphony No. 1 In G minor, Op. 7, FS 16: III. Allegro Comodo - Andante Sostenuto - Tempo I

4. Symphony No. 1 In G minor, Op. 7, FS 16: IV. Finale: Allegro Con Fuoco

5. Symphony No. 3, Op. 27, FS 60 'Sinfonia Espansiva': I. Allegro Espansivo

6. Symphony No. 3, Op. 27, FS 60 'Sinfonia Espansiva': II. Andante Pastorale

7. Symphony No. 3, Op. 27, FS 60 'Sinfonia Espansiva': III. Allegretto Un Poco

8. Symphony No. 3, Op. 27, FS 60 'Sinfonia Espansiva': IV. Finale: Allegro

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