2023-05-19 14:03:00
CD novelty. Fabio Luisi made a remarkable overall recording with the Copenhagen Orchestra.
From the perspective of Viennese music lovers, this box with three CDs is just right. The Vienna Philharmonic recently expanded its repertoire under the direction of the doyen of international conductors, Herbert Blomstedt, and performed the Fifth Symphony by the Danish national composer Carl Nielsen, completed in 1922, for the first time. The audience was enraptured by the expressive power of this music, a kind of Western variant of the subjectivist symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich.
A complete recording of Nielsen’s symphonic works has now been released, played by an orchestra that counts this music as part of the genetic code: the Danish National Orchestra has gone into the studio for Deutsche Grammophon under the baton of its chief conductor Fabio Luisi. A gamble. To date, few first-class interpretations of all six works are available, but it was precisely this Copenhagen orchestra under Blomstedt that presented a CD collection in the 1970s that had previously been celebrated as a reference interpretation.
Tragedies and satyr plays
Luisi now counters this with crystal-clearly structured, yet dramatic renditions; a balancing act that is indispensable with this music, because Nielsen tells stories in all his works, including those that use theatrical means of expression. One hears tragedies (as in the case of the Fifth) or (as in the concluding Sixth) also a satyr play that leaves no means unexploited to question symphonic (and cultural) history. This music can also sow doubts with drastic sounds, it can caricature, it can even snub the listener by “letting him go” with, shall we say, an unseemly gesture: Nielsen’s symphony cycle actually closes with a cynical – culturally critical? – Point.
Luisi draws the entire broad spectrum of these different works sharply and contours, the caricatures and distorted images as well as the many expressive, passionately erupting, violently attacking sound paintings that can be found above all in the earlier works. But he never exaggerates. The strength of his interpretation lies in its sovereign mastery, which lets the listener notice that although a composer is exploring the limits of musical expression, he remains consistently in the territory of traditional forms and – above all – the major-minor tonality.
Of course, the limits are stretched as far as possible in the direction of modern stylistic devices. That was Nielsen’s position in early 20th century music history. He was not a late or late romantic. He knew how to define his idiosyncratic modernism without forgetting its roots for a moment.
The balancing act succeeded. There is probably no more convincing overall presentation of this symphonic cosmos. In the past, individual symphonies have admittedly been played more spectacularly, urgently and suggestively in the recording studio. Above all, the Fourth by the Berlin Philharmonic under Karajan (also DG), the conductor’s only attempt with a work by this composer; but of tremendous density in his statement: Karajan grasps Nielsen’s program of the “inextinguishable” more radically than almost anyone else: a flame of confidence blazes in this recording even at the moment of extreme distress; not even the apocalyptic duel of two timpani groups – one of the singular moments of modern symphony! – can wipe them out.
Bernstein once morest Karajan
Equally inevitable was Leonard Bernstein’s Fifth with the New York Philharmonic (Sony). Here it is the entire drum battery that, with its attacks, disturbs every attempt by the rest of the orchestra to organize itself in a downright frightening way. Many a positive, life-affirming moment in Nielsen’s symphony is also brought to life in an enchantingly powerful way in the new recording by the Danes, the exuberance of the waltz beginning of the third (“Sinfonia espansiva”), which breaks out with sudden rhythmic acceleration, but also the picturesque character images of the “Four Temperaments”. in the individual movements of the second.
For curious, open-minded music lovers, the edition might be an awakening experience.
(“Die Presse”, print edition, May 20, 2023)
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