Favourite Nielsen Symphonies

[oliver sudden]

No 6 is baffling to me (like the flute and clarinet concertos, whose splintered structures seem to get in the way of whatever musical ideas are there. I have accompanied both many times and can see on the page a certain logic, but it doesn't translate into a satisfactory aural experience).

…

For me, though, I never have the same sense of completeness from Nielsen as I do from Sibelius (who was in any case a very different sort of composer).

The wind concertos (like the wind quintet) seem to me to be a particularly interesting and extreme example of a sort of instrumental characterisation he was striving for more and more later in his career but which perhaps he didn’t have the toolbox to bring off coherently. Of course characterisation is the whole raison d’être of the second symphony but that’s at the level of the whole instrumental apparatus… in the later things you have individual instruments taking a stand against everything else that’s going on, whether it’s the timpani in 4, the snare drum in 5 and the clarinet concerto, or the trombone in 6 and the flute concerto. Very effective and dramatic but perhaps at the price of coherence? But the incoherence is fascinating for me, even (especially!) when it’s unsatisfying.

And yes, Sibelius is quite a different business, even in 4 and 7 when things don’t gel in the way they do in the other symphonies.

[Pulcinella]

Number 4 is a favourite for BBC MM: it has featured THREE times.

Volume 15, Number 12: BBCSO/Vanska (Proms performance, on DVD)
Volume 9, Number 9: BBCNOW/Sakari
Volume 25, Number 9: Halle/Elder

Three others have made one appearance each.

Symphony 1: Volume 14, Number 11: Ulster O/Fürst
Symphony 2: Volume 1, Number 3: BBCSO/A Davis
Symphony 5: Volume 21, Number 11: BBCNOW/Søndergård

[LMcD]

(I wouldn’t call Sibelius Scandinavian, myself…)

I once had a Finnish work colleague who insisted that I say 'Nordic' when discussing Sibelius.