Nielsen
Simfoni No. 3, Sinfonia Espansiva, op. 27; Saul og David: Prelude to the Fourth Act, Allegro burrascoso; Battle Music – Allegro violente; Jørgensen transkr. Nielsen Højby skyttemarch
Rikke Sandberg og Kristoffer Hyldig (klaver duo)
OUR Recordings 8.226923 (46 minutter)
******(6) (MAX)
Who’d have thought that anyone could release an album of first recordings of Nielsen piano music a quarter of the way through the 21st century? But that’s what we have here, in the form of four-hand Nielsen arrangements, both of his own music and of a piece by his father, Niels Jørgensen (1835–1915). The main work, obviously, is the 35-minute Sinfonia Espansiva, which is terrifically effective in this version – only recently discovered – for piano four hands that Nielsen prepared c. 1911 as a promotional tool. Of course, there are moments when one misses the sheer force of the orchestra, as with the wildly energetic waltz that breaks out in the first movement, but without orchestral colour one can concentrate more directly on what’s happening in the music itself, the contrapuntal textures and harmony especially – and perhaps even an advantage: I’ve always found the intrusion of the two vocalising voices in the slow movement something of a hair in the soup (as Nielsen once described the harp in the orchestra), but of course there’s no such distraction here.
Nielsen’s pianist friend Henrik Knudsen prepared the vocal score of the opera Saul og David (1899–91), with (as usual) a solo piano for the orchestral reduction, but for some reasons Nielsen himself arranged two extracts for piano duet – both rather noisy toccata-like pieces only a few minutes long.
The website www.barndomshjem.carlnielsen.org explains why Nielsen and his father, a painter and village musician, had different family names: ‘En ny lov krævede genbrug af efternavne, men præsten i den stedlige kirke fastholdt at børn fik efternavn efter faderens fornavn. Egentlig skulle alle børnene være døbt Jørgensen, og komponisten ville have heddet Carl Jørgensen’. That’s almost more interesting than Jørgensen’s Højby skyttemarch (1860s) itself, of which Nielsen made two band arrangements in 1910, five years before his father’s death; Kristoffer Hyldig then made this version for four-hand piano for this recording. The music is jolly but completely anonymous.
Top-drawer playing from Rikke Sandberg og Kristoffer Hyldig, excellent sound from Preben Iwan and interesting booklet notes from Sandberg and Niels Bo Foltmann. So now we have something we never knew we might have: an album of the complete Nielsen works for piano four hands”. Martin Anderson