Carl Nielsen
Flute Concerto
1. Allegro moderato
2. Allegretto, un poco
Violin Concerto, Op. 33
3. I. Largo – Allegro cavelleresco
4. II. Poco adagio – Allegretto scherzando
5. Saga-Drøm, Op. 39
6. Hymnus Amoris, Op. 12
J.F. Frøhlich
1. Erik Menveds barndom: Festmusik
J.P.E. Hartmann
2. Yrsa, Op.78: Overture
Carl Nielsen
Maskarade, CNW 2
3. Overture
4. Magdelone’s Dancing Scene
5. Prelude
6. Hanedans (Cockerel’s Dance)
Ejnar Jacobsen
Symphony No. 1 ‘Now’
7. I. Allegro moderato, con fuoco
8. II. Lento semplice
9. III. Poco sostenuto – Allegro ma non troppo
Svend Erik Tarp
L’alternasi delle stagioni, Op. 46
10. Intrada
11. Sommer: Arietta
12. Efterår: Furlana
13. Winter: Grave
14. Forår: Cascarda
Poul Schierbeck
Jylland
15. Sommer
16. Efterår
17. Vinter
18. Forår
Thomas Jensen ©
By Martin Granau
Volume 19 of the Thomas Jensen Legacy presents the conductor on home soil, as it were, in Danish music, with Carl Nielsen as the focal point. The two concertos encompass his journey from a nationalist, Romantic idiom, in the Violin Concerto from 1911, towards a personal expression of modernism exemplified by the Flute Concerto of 1925.
The Flute Concerto arose from Nielsen’s acquaintance with the Copenhagen Wind Quintet. Having written a quintet for the ensemble in 1922, he conceived the idea of writing a concerto for each of its members. In the event, he completed only two such works before his death in 1931, for flute and for clarinet. In each case, the soloist is paired with a second actor from within the orchestra. In the case of the Flute Concerto, it is the bass trombone, who barges in on the flute soloist’s Pan-like revels and reflections, yet eventually stumbles as if by chance on the resolution to the work, which then proceeds to a happy reconciliation.
The Concerto was composed for the flautist Holger Gilbert-Jespersen, who gave the first performance in Paris in October 1926, after which Nielsen recast the original ending he had hastily thrown together for that occasion. The soloist in this performance was the DRSO’s principal, Poul Birkelund (1917-2006), who had been taught by Gilbert-Jespersen. He joined the DRSO from the Tivoli Orchestra (1938-43), and in 1961 became a professor at the Royal Danish Conservatory of Music, of which he became rector from 1971 until 1975.
Nielsen once conducted Saga-Drøm in between the two movements of his Violin Concerto. That one-off experiment was an acknowledgment that the two parts of the Concerto inhabit contrasting worlds. Both movements begin with a slow introduction, the first of them amounting to a taxing cadenza for the soloist; a professional orchestral violinist himself, Nielsen understood how to write for the instrument from the inside, and he was as confident in producing neo-Baroque arabesques as in shaping a ‘chivalric’ Allegro, and in devising the singing and playful passages of the concluding Rondo.
The first movement was written during a stay with Edward Grieg’s widow, Nina, at Troldhaugen, while the second movement was begun at Damgaard Manor in Jutland and finished in Copenhagen. He entrusted the solo part to the foremost Danish violinist of the day, Peder Møller, who learnt it in a fortnight before giving the first performance at a concert with the Royal Chapel under the composer’s direction on February 28, 1912. His successor in this performance under Thomas Jensen was Arne Karecki (1929-98). A student of Max Schlüter and Erling Bloch at the Royal Danish Conservatory of Music, Karecki became the DRSO’s youngest member when first hired in 1948, and then became principal second violin in 1955. As a former ‘second violinist’ himself, in the orchestra of the Royal Chapel, Nielsen would surely have approved.
Saga-Drøm is a tone-poem inspired by an Icelandic saga about Gunnar af Hliderende, who was sentenced to exile. When he and his entourage are resting on the way to the ship that will take him to Norway, he falls asleep and dreams, and it is this dream that Nielsen portrays here musically under the motto: ‘Now Gunnar dreams; let him enjoy his dream in peace.’ The dream in question involves Gunnar and his companions being set upon by wolves, but the piece begins and ends in a kind of ambiguous calm/inertia which would in time become a characteristic mood of Nielsen’s later music. In between, there is a freely heterophonic passage which reminded one early reviewer of the orchestra tuning up, and again Nielsen reprised the technique in later pieces such as ‘The Market at Ispahan’ within his incidental music to Aladdin. Nielsen again conducted the premiere of Saga-Drøm, at the Musikforeningen in 1908, and dedicated the score to the Swedish composer Bror Beckman.
A decade earlier in the same hall, the conductor had led the premiere of Hymnus amoris, an exuberant cantata in praise of love. The text was initially drafted by the composer, polished by the literary historian Axel Olrik and then translated into Latin by J.L. Heiberg in order to give it, in Nielsen’s words, ‘a more objective and universal stamp’. The original idea came to Nielsen while on honeymoon with his wife, the sculptor Anne Marie, née Brodersen, when they saw a painting by Titian, The Miracle of the Jealous Husband. Anne Marie drew the title page for the score, which portrays the evolution of human love from childhood to old age.
From the same concert as the Flute Concerto, this performance of Hymnus amoris was given at the Tivoli pleasure gardens as part of the annual Ballet and Music Festival, founded in 1950 at the behest of the Royal Ballet. The festival expanded during the 1950s with concerts of symphonic, chamber and church music, and the DRSO first participated in 1957. The cast of solo singers was a distinguished one, featuring the soprano Ruth Guldbæk, a lyric soprano who not only worked at the Royal Theatre, but had also performed at Covent Garden in London in the early 1950s. The tenor Niels Brincker was also associated with the theatre, but also made a living as a freelance singer and was frequently used on the radio, because of his sight-reading abilities.
RELEASE DATE: October 2023
CATALOGUE NUMBER: DACOCD 929
EAN: 5709499929001
