A fascinating production of a passionate masterpiece

The Nielsen Year in 2015 gave us a chance to see the great Danish composer in the round. The focus was naturally on the symphonies and concertos, which surely place Nielsen among the top 20th century composers. But new productions of his comic masterpiece Maskarade and his tragic Saul and David give us a chance to see experience Nielsen's greatness as an operatic composer as well.

Saul and David is in the sadly small subset of operas one can call dramatically coherent. Credit for this goes to the source material and the librettist Einar Christiansen, but equally to Carl Nielsen, whose music plays a major role in moving the story along, building its climaxes and giving us room to breath and reflect when the action flags. Robert Layton says Saul and David is "...borne along effortlessly on the essentially symphonic current of Nielsen's musical thought." Most importantly, Nielsen's music opens a window into the tortured soul of the protagonist, King Saul. The hero of this new DVD from Dacapo is conductor Michael Schonwandt, whose finger is always on the dramatic pulse of the work. He ensures that his players and singers (including the very important chorus) keep the musical pulse in sync with the drama.

I would most definitely call the production, by the English team of David Pountney (stage direction) and Robert Innes Hopkins (set and costume design), fascinating, but it's not perfect. To call it half-baked is an exaggeration. Though it maybe could have used a bit more time at 350 degrees/gas mark 3, there are lots of tasty bits here. In an update that pushes forward to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict there are plenty of opportunities for striking scenes and situations, especially since there is constant ambiguity about who's who in terms of Israelites and Philistines. If Nielsen's music reflects Saul's inner turmoil, the flickering TV sets in the bombed-out concrete high-rise apartments surrounding the stage that house the chorus show the effect the King's actions have on the outside world. His inner troubles and power struggle with Samuel/God have a terrible impact in the Real World, and the Media is there reporting it all. The mixed chorus makes more sense singing about martial affairs when women and men are dressed in battle-gear, with berets and AK-47s. Pountney's depiction of the prophet Samuel as a religious fundamentalist is a master-stroke, though I won't spoil the full extent and dramatic reveal, of this crucial change.

On the other hand, I found some design and direction decisions puzzling. The light show at the beginning of Act 4 seems superfluous to the great depiction of battle provided by Nielsen in his Prelude. The costumes and props were hit and miss. The bull sacrificed in Act 1 lacked something (glamour? maybe not glamour, but something), though the call-back of the hook in Act 4 is devastating. However, I loved everything about the Witch of Endor scene, including the bicycle. The ballet set-pieces (choreographed by Rebekka Lund) were lovely diversions, and helped David Pountney sell his concept, though maybe not in a completely organic way.

In terms of sound, this version of the opera is a definite advance over the Jascha Horenstein 1972 recording from 1972. It's a closer contest between the new recording and the Chandos one from 1990, conducted by Neeme Jarvi, which has great sound. Of course, the DTS 5.1 audio on the DVD is an advance, so I'm going to give the new disc top honours in this regard. As to the relative musical merits of the three recordings, it's instructive to note all three come from Danish orchestras. This is a demonstration of the odd disregard for the opera outside of Denmark. Surely this work would be a big hit in New York or London or Toronto, especially with the juicy acting/singing role of Saul. The available recordings have all been lucky with that part: Horenstein had Boris Christoff in his prime, Jarvi's Saul is the marvellous Aage Haugland, and here baritone Johan Reuter is really outstanding. The rest of the cast is very good as well, uniformly good as actors, and the chorus is excellent. Pountney makes good use of the chorus as actors, which is something that seems to happen routinely in today's best productions. Gone are the days, I guess, of standing in line up-stage, singing hard and looking awkward in a toga. In spite of Christoff in the Horenstein version, though, and fine singing and playing in the Jarvi version, I'm most impressed with Schonwandt's vision and follow-through in this excellent recording.

The trailer for the DVD gives you a good idea of the range of this piece, and the various aspects of this production. Dacapo was one of the big stars of the Nielsen Year; bravo for this!

Fresh new music from Denmark

Here’s a CD with a bit of a branding issue. I nearly missed it, but was saved by the Nielsen 150th Anniversary year. A disc described thusly showed up one morning on the Naxos Music Library:

NIELSEN, C.: Oboe Music (Sletternes Sønner) (Artved, Moller, Fønnesbech)

Since no composer has given me greater pleasure in 2015 than Carl Nielsen, I thought I’d check it out. And it turns out to be a real winner: arrangements by Peter Jensen of Nielsen songs for oboe, string quartet and jazz piano & bass. And there’s a major bonus: the string quartet is the Danish String Quartet, whose Wood Works album topped my list in 2014. Here's the CD promo video from Naxos:

Back in the Chopin Year of 2010 (five years ago already!) my favourite album was also an arrangement for jazz ensemble, of Chopin songs by Kuba Stankiewicz and sung by Inga Lewandowska, entitled Chopin Songbook.

The new Danish album has some similarities, though Jensen’s arrangements have a much broader stylistic range, from breezy Bill Evans-style improvisations to more angular, modernist experiments. A key point: the genius of Chopin and Nielsen is evident in both CDs. This is ground-breaking music with a fresh new sound. I’ve come to expect that from the Danish String Quartet, but it’s also nice to be introduced to such accomplished musicians as Artved (oboe), Moller (piano) and Fønnesbech (bass).

Note: the Chopin Songbook might be hard to track down, though there's a link to a vendor at Amazon.com above. You can get an idea of the album from this track on YouTube:

A marvellous Maskarade

From October 8, 2015:

One of the highlights of the Nielsen Year (it’s going by so fast!) is this excellent new DaCapo recording of Maskarade, the comic opera Nielsen completed in 1906. It’s no wonder this marvellous work is called the Danish national opera: it has some great tunes, with many tender moments as well as stirring ensembles. There’s a fairly logical libretto with interesting and often funny situations. Perhaps most importantly, though, Nielsen’s orchestra plays the same role as Mozart’s in his finest comedies, with innumerable serious or comic touches coming from the pit rather than the stage. The soloists are uniformly excellent, and the chorus is vigorous and engaging. Michael Schonwandt conducts the Danish National Symphony Orchestra in music that all the musicians have in their blood, and you can tell. The musicianship, the excellent Super Audio sound, and a high quality CD package all combine to present a masterwork to its best effect, in the 150th anniversary of its composer’s birth.

The highlight of the Nielsen Year

From July 15, 2015:

The highlight of the Nielsen Year has been this series of orchestral works on Da Capo, with Alan Gilbert conducting the New York Philharmonic. This is the fourth, and unfortunately the last, disc in the series, but the project ends as strongly as it began. The acerbic clarinet concerto is brilliantly played by Anthony McGill, while Robert Langevin provides virtuosity and passion in the flute concerto.

The most important work, though, is the violin concerto, which I consider the greatest in the 20th century. The competition on record is very strong, with Myung-Whun Chung, Michael Schonwandt and Maxim Vengerov providing persuasive versions. My favourite version on disc has always been Cho-Liang Lin’s. A live performance of his, back in the mid-1980s, was a revelation, and gave me my first understanding of Nielsen’s place among the greatest composers of the century. This recording with Nikolaj Znaider, though, surpasses them all. There is more tenderness, fire and sheer beauty in this half-hour of music than I thought possible. Thanks to Da Capo, to the New York Philharmonic, and to Maestro Gilbert for these beautiful CDs.

Here Gilbert talks about Nielsen & Znaider:

Music of simplicity and subtlety

From March 20, 2015:

In the preface to his Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman says “Nothing is better than simplicity . . . . nothing can make up for excess or for the lack of definiteness.” This might be a motto for Carl Nielsen’s Songs for Choir, which, though they are not folk songs or based on folk melodies, are meant by the composer to speak to ordinary Danes as if they were. Twenty of these songs are gathered on this new Dacapo CD, sung by Ars Nova Copenhagen and directed by Michael Bojesen. Most of the songs were originally written for a single voice with piano accompaniment; Bojesen has arranged 17 for four-part a cappella choir. The remaining three were originally written by Nielsen in four parts SATB. Ars Nova Copenhagen’s 12 voices a fine match for this music, providing colour and vivacity to Nielsen’s subtleties. Dacapo provides its usual deluxe presentation.

Important disc from the Nielsen Project

From October 29, 2014:

This new DaCapo CD with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Alan Gilbert includes fresh live recordings of two of the greatest 20th Century Symphonies, the first and fourth by Carl Nielsen. These are strongly felt performances; Gilbert calls this "full-blooded, passionate, dramatic and ultimately human music." An early review of the First Symphony, also quoted in the liner notes, called Nielsen "ruthless but innocent - like a child playing with dynamite." Gilbert shows the Bart Simpson side of this astonishing work, downplaying its 19th Century Romantic roots in favour of something sharper, ruder, more modern. The challenge for today's musicians is to present revolutionary music of a century (Nielsen or Stravinsky) or two or three centuries ago (Beethoven or Monteverdi) and make it sound as freshly radical today. This means turning up the volume or sharpening the focus, and Gilbert and his excellent players do both here, to great effect.

I don't mean to slight the Fourth Symphony. This great work, written during the slaughter of World War I, represents the mature composer's deepest thoughts on life as well as music. Its exalted programme - it's called `The Inextinguishable" - might have condemned a lesser composer's music to bathetic gestures and cliche, but Nielsen's default mode is liveliness. His music always has a strong pulse, and this work has such a vital forward thrust that even the grief Nielsen expresses over the violence overtaking the world has its own dramatic interest. Gilbert and the orchestra are again admirably direct and dramatic, and are aided by a clear and lifelike recording.

This is more than a great Nielsen recording, though great Nielsen recordings are hardly thick on the ground. It is part of the vitally important Nielsen Project (nyphil.org/nielsenproject) which will present concerts and recordings of the six symphonies and three concertos from 2012 to 2015. Alan Gilbert deserves a great deal of credit for his vision in bringing this music to a wider audience and raising Nielsen's reputation closer to what he deserves: amongst the three or four greatest composers of the 20th Century.