Niels Viggo Bentzon
Violin Concerto No. 1, Op. 50
1. Tempo giusto
2. Cantilene interotti: Presto – Rondo: Allegro
Franz Syberg
Symphony
3. Andante molto – Allegro moderato – Andante molto
4. Adagio molto
5. Allegro moderato – Allegro non troppo
Knudåge Riisager
6. Primavera, Concert Overture, Op. 31
7. Little Overture for strings
Siegfried Salomon
Cello Concerto, Op. 34 (1922)
1. Allegro moderato
2. Andante cantabile
3. Allegro giocoso
Leif Thybo
4. Cello Concerto
Moderato – Allegro energico – Moderato – Vivace
Niels Viggo Bentzon
Cello Concerto No. 1, Op. 106
5. Fantasia
6. Rondo
7. Aria
8. Alla marcia
Thomas Jensen Legacy, Vol. 10 ©
By Martin Granau/Peter Quantrill
The music on this album takes a snapshot of Danish idioms in the mid-20th century, drawing on the Romanticism of JPE Hartmann and Niels W. Gade as well as the unavoidable figure of Carl Nielsen. Among the five composers represented here, the most open of them to the trends of European modernism was Niels Viggo Bentzon.
Composed in 1952, the first of his four violin concertos affords a fine example of both his craft and the virtuosity of the DRSO’s long-time concert-master, Charles Senderovitz. This performance marked the concerto’s broadcast premiere, given in September 1957 within the DRSO’s regular series of Thursday concerts. The score seems to have disappeared thereafter, and this broadcast survives as the sole extant record of the piece.
The concerto dates from Bentzon’s ‘metamorphosis period’ of the 1950s, which emerged from the free diatonicism of his early pieces and would in time yield to a more avant-garde dismantling of conventions in the 1960s. In a manner superficially resembling the contrapuntal working of Beethoven’s late quartets, Bentzon used the ‘metamorphosis’ technique to generate dense, overlapping textures from a single motif. In the first movement of the First Violin Concerto, the motif is as simple as a four-note rising scale, separated by intervals of semitone-tone-semitone. The orchestra carries the weight of the harmonic argument while the soloist rhapsodizes more freely above them. A cadenza for the soloist is placed in time-honoured fashion towards the movement’s close.
Bentzon conceived the concerto in a spacious two-movement form, and cast the second of them in a predominantly lyrical vein as ‘Cantilene interotti’ (Interrupted Songs), introduced by a violent orchestral outburst. The solo part is alternately supported and challenged by the accompaniment, while it states and develops a motif which returns throughout the movement like a rondo. A version of the first movement’s scale-motif contributes to the accelerating momentum of the concerto’s conclusion.
RELEASE DATE: February 2022
CATALOGUE NUMBER: DACOCD 920
EAN: 5709499920008
