Thomas Jensen Legacy, Vol. 22

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Symphony No. 33 in B flat major, K319
1. Allegro assai
2. Andante moderato
3. Menuetto & Trio
4. Finale. Allegro assai
Live broadcast, Radio Concert Hall, October 23, 1961

Violin Concerto No. 3 in G major, K216
1. Allegro
2. Adagio
3. Rondeau
Tutter Givskov, violin
Live broadcast, Casino Slagelse, May 11, 1962

Symphony No. 34 in C major, K338
1. Allegro vivace
2. Andante di molto
3. Allegro molto
Live broadcast, Esbjerg, May 7, 1958

Symphony No. 39 in E flat major, K543
3. Menuetto. Allegretto – Trio
Tivoli Concert Hall Orchestra
Tono X25007, Rec. Autumn 1942

CD 2

Arcangelo Corelli
Concerto Grosso Op. 6 No. 3 in C minor
1. Largo
2. Allegro
3. Grave
4. Vivace
5. Allegro
Chamber Concert, Radio Concert Hall, November 19, 1962

Johann Christian Bach
Overture in B flat major, Op. 18 No. 2
1. Allegro assai
2. Andante
3. Presto
Thursday Concert, Radio Concert Hall, September 27, 1962

Joseph Haydn
Notturno in C major, Hob.II:31
1. Allegro
2. Adagio
3. Finale
Chamber Concert, Radio Concert Hall, November 19, 1962

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Serenade No. 6 in D major, K239 – Serenata Notturna
1. Marcia (Maestoso)
2. Menuetto – Trio
3. Rondeau
Leo Hansen, 1st Violin, Arne Karecki, 2nd Violin, Gunnar Frederiksen, Viola
Helge Plough Christensen, Double Bass
Live broadcast, Radio Concert Hall, October 23, 1961

Le nozze di Figaro
Overture
Live broadcast, Casino Slagelse, May 11, 1962

Les Petits Riens (ballet), K. Anhang. 10/299b
1. Overture
2. Larghetto
3. Gavotte (Allegro)
4. Adagio
5. (no marking)
6. Pantomime
Live broadcast, Casino Slagelse, May 11, 1962

Die Zauberflöte, K620
Overture
Live broadcast, Esbjerg , May 7, 1958

The Thomas Jensen Legacy, Volume 22 © 

On this album, Thomas Jensen conducts Baroque and Classical-era repertoire, recorded at concerts in both the Radio Concert Hall in Copenhagen and on the orchestra’s regional tours of Denmark. Such concerts had been central to the mission of the DRSO ever since it had been founded by Emil Holm in 1925. A regular concert series was established in 1928, and from 1933 – when the orchestra moved to the ‘Stærekassen’ – as the second stage of the Royal Theatre was nicknamed – the concert series was known as the ‘Thursday concerts’, as it has been ever since. Holm entertained the ambition to educate the Danish people with such broadcast concerts. In the big cities, symphonic concerts were given by military bands working with local string orchestras, but anyone living in a rural area would experience classical symphonies only by playing them in piano transcriptions at home. Through the radio, Holm could change this situation, and he worked on the basis that the technical challenges of broadcasting a usable radio signal would be resolved as he built up a radio orchestra.
The Austro-German orchestral canon was the focus of Holm’s efforts, and in his mind it required a German conductor to do it justice. And so, just as the Russian conductor Nikolai Malko schooled the DRSO in Russian and French repertoire, Fritz Busch trained it in Austro-German repertoire between 1932 and 1951. This performing tradition became known within the orchestra as ‘The Busch Way’ even until the 1980s, carried on by its native conductors such as Launy Grøndahl and then Thomas Jensen, even though Jensen only joined the orchestra years after Busch’s death.
Almost from its inception, the DRSO gave concerts outside Copenhagen. After the war, regional orchestras grew in number and size, but a report from the National Orchestra Committee in 1947 recommended that 12.5% of the DRSO’s time should be allocated to regional concerts, and the Radio Concert Hall should be mad e available for regional orchestras. The Danish Radio administrators declined to implement such a scheme, but they assisted regional orchestras in both management and promotion.
Meanwhile, local associations of listeners were encouraged to help with the organization of the DRSO’s domestic tours. This gave a boost to the support of the orchestra on its regional tours, which took in many smaller towns such as Slagelse and Esbjerg, where they would play in community centres and sports halls. Such tours declined as local orchestras became more professional, and the DRSO gives almost all its concerts in the Danish capital. In 2009, they moved from the Radio Concert Hall into a brand new venue designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel. Mozart’s Violin Concerto No.3 features the Danish violinist Tutter Givskov (1930- 2023). She entered the conservatoire in Copenhagen as a 14-year-old, and after her graduation in 1947, she studied for two years in London with Henry Holst. Having joined the Tivoli SO in 1951, she moved to the Orchestra of the Kongelige Kapel in 1954. She took up a teaching post at the Royal Danish Academy of Music, where in 1988 she became the first female professor.
In Mozart’s Serenata Notturna, there is fine interplay between the orchestra and the quartet ensemble of principals led by the DRSO’s concertmaster Leo Hansen. Jensen’s Mozart is sprightly and well articulated, even if he sets slower tempi than modern listeners are accustomed to. The Danish Tono label made a studio recording in 1942 of Jensen conducting the Minuet from Symphony No.39: there is a noticeable difference in size between the smaller Tivoli Orchestra and the DRSO as well as greater technical polish to the playing from the 1960s.
Mozart composed his five violin concertos in a single burst of activity between April and December 1775. The autograph copy of K216 bears a completion date of 12 September, and it marks a notable advance on the previous two concertos in terms of shaping both melody and form. His father Leopold was a widely recognised authority on violin technique, and through him Mozart would have been familiar with the work of outstanding violinist-composers such as Corelli, Locatelli and Tartini. From these models, he adapted the Baroque form of ritornello, alternating between solo and tutti writing, and combined it with the newer and more developed sonata form. In the Adagio of K216, he accesses a realm of deeper feeling which would become increasingly characteristic of his mature work.
A matter of months later, in January 1776, Mozart wrote the Serenata notturna for a winter party. A quartet of instrumentalists forms a concertino group, separated from a larger string orchestra and drums. The quartet probably walked in to the stately march, and to them alone is given the Trio of the Minuet. The final Rondo is sent on its merry way with a bucolic theme, and there follows a good deal of to-and-fro between the two ensembles.
By the middle of 1777, Mozart had been sacked from his court post in Salzburg, and he travelled to Mannheim in search of employment. There the 21-year-old fell properly in love for the first time, with the soprano Aloysia Weber, but no permanent post presented itself, and Leopold urged his son to cut his losses. Mozart left for Paris with his mother in March 1778; in June, the Academie Royale de Musique staged a new ballet, Les petits riens (‘The Little Nothings’), to a score by four composers. Mozart’s contributions are pastoral in mood, fitted for the light-pastoral tableaux. The penultimate Pantomime number appears to take its melody from the French children’s song Ah! vous dirai-je, maman, which Mozart would later turn into a set of piano variations, and which in the 19th century became known in England as Twinkle, twinkle, little star.
Returning to Salzburg in January 1779, Mozart was appointed court organist: a post evidently not so onerous as his previous duties to the court, from which he had been summarily relieved in 1777, and the following two years were productive, including the composition of Symphony No.33 K319 (July 1779) and No.34 K338 (August 1780). One notable feature of K319 is the recurrence of the motto theme C-D-F-E in the first movement’s development section, after Mozart had used it in the slow movement of his First Symphony, and before it crowns his symphonic career as the fugue subject of the finale to the ‘Jupiter’. K338 has a more festive and Italian character, as a symphonic translation of the opera buffa world which he refined to a peak of perfection in collaboration with the librettist Lorenzo da Ponte for a trilogy of stage works, beginning with Le nozze di Figaro in 1786.
The eight-year-old Mozart had been in London when he wrote his First Symphony in 1764. Leopold had organised the tour across the Channel in search of earnings and recognition on behalf of his prodigally talented children (Mozart’s sister Nannerl was also required to play for her supper). Thus the boy Mozart met Johann Christian Bach, youngest son of Johann Sebastian, who had settled in the English capital two years earlier. JC gave Wolfgang regular tuition over the course of the next five months, for which Mozart was grateful ever thereafter. Having learnt of JC’s death in January 1782, he paid tribute to his former teacher by quoting from an overture by Bach in the slow movement of his own Piano Concerto No.12 K414. During the autumn of 1781, the London publisher William Forster had begun to publish what became a set of six symphonies Op.18, though Bach had written some of them rather earlier. The second of the set began life as the overture to his opera Lucio Silla, first performed in 1776 (four years after Mozart had written his own opera on the same subject for Milan). At the centre of the sinfonia’s bustling activity is a long and eloquent oboe solo, pitched in style between Handel’s London and Mozart’s Salzburg.
Between 1788 and 1790, at the behest of the King of Naples, Haydn produced eight notturni for the lira organizzata, a kind of hurdy-gurdy which went the way of the baryton in becoming obsolete soon after he had composed for it. On the rare occasions when these works receive modern performances, the two lire parts are taken by flute and oboe, following Haydn’s own practice in his London concerts. The limited tonal range of the lire confined Haydn to three key signatures – C, G or F major – but such restrictions hardly inhibited his imagination, and Hob.II:31 bears comparison with Mozart’s wind serenades in its lightly worn sophistication.

© Martin Granau / Peter Quantrill, 2024

RELEASE DATE: April 2024

CATALOGUE NUMBER: DACOCD 932

EAN: 5709499932001