***** The definitive survey of Nielsen’s neglected but fascinating piano output

NIELSEN Welcome to 20 Della Grazia, Little Marie! Chaconne, op. 32. Five Piano Pieces, op. 3. Symphonic Suite, op. 8. Souvenirs from Carl Nielsen—11 Small Piano Pieces. Piano Music for Young and Old, op. 53. Prelude for the New Century. Three Piano Pieces, op. 59. Theme with Variations, op. 40. Piano Piece. Humoresque-Bagatelles, op. 11. Two Character Pieces. Suite, op. 45, “The Luciferian.” The Dream about “Silent Night.” Excerpts from The Mother for Piano. Dance of the Handmaidens from Hagbarth and Signe. Prelude to Snefrid for Piano. Elves’ Dance from Sir Oluf he rides. Music for Otto Benzon’s Play, Parents. Oriental Festival March. Dances from Aladdin for Piano.  Rikke Sandberg (pn)  OUR RECORDINGS .8.226939-41 (3 CDs: 200:28)

Recording all of Carl Nielsen’s piano music is a personal project for a Danish pianist like Rikke Sandberg that is also culturally important given his status as Denmark’s national composer. Sandberg is an accomplished and appealing performer who is not only devoted to her subject but an avid manuscript hunter. Surprising as it sounds, there were still piano pieces, generally of a modest occasional nature, to be tracked down, notation to be deciphered, and other editorial work to do. In all these regards, this 3-CD set is likely to be definitive.
Nielsen looms over Denmark’s musical identity, and for outsiders the boldness and unpredictability of his mature symphonies and concertos puts him on a footing with Sibelius and Prokofiev. But the relationship at home is much more intimate. As Sandberg comments in her very readable program notes, “High and low alike have grown up with his children’s songs. Everyone in Denmark knows Carl Nielsen, whether they are aware of it or not.” But if your identity isn’t Danish, a gap opens up. Nielsen is famous internationally for a small selection of his large output; his piano music, which occupied almost forty years of his life, is unknown even to music-lovers like me who are awed by the last three symphonies and the concertos for violin, flute, and clarinet.
The sudden arrival of three and a half hours of solo piano music brings a downpour of pieces—large, small, occasional, casual, and formal, including arrangements, suites, etc.—that begs to be appreciated out of the blue, as it were. A glance at the headnote offers a few entry points. First, Nielsen turned his back on the mainstream Romantic forms of sonatas, fantasies, rhapsodies, etudes, and preludes. In the main he was drawn instead to the less formal level of Romanticism involved in home music-making, as indicated by one of his major collections, Piano Music for Young and Old, op. 53.
Piano music for amateurs had a great Nordic exemplar in Grieg’s Lyric Pieces, and Nielsen mined the same vein in suites of accessible, charming miniatures along with occasional pieces. He was not an enfant terrible. His first published piano work, the Five Piano Pieces, op. 3, was composed in his early twenties, between 1887 and 1890. It was joined by similar suites around the date of his First Symphony in 1894.
Nor could Nielsen be called a youthful firebrand or radical. As a teenager he was rescued from working as a bugler and trombonist in a military band through the intercession of Niels Gade, director of the Royal Academy in Copenhagen, who arranged for him to enter for studies. Gade was by most reckonings the only Danish composer with a broad European reputation. Also a conductor and violinist (Nielsen’s instrument), he led the premieres of both the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto and the Schumann Piano Concerto.
Gade cast a long shadow over Danish musical life, and a conservative bent. Nielsen’s instincts pulled him in other directions, but the early piano works are stylistically typical of his milieu. When it came to his first significant large-scale piano work, the Symphonic Suite, op. 8 that followed the success of his First Symphony, he took as his primary influence early Brahms, namely the Piano Sonata No. 3, from which there are some striking borrowings and resemblances. It is hard up to this point to detect the bold imagination that would emerge, but the suite’s skillful Brahmsian homages are quite assured.
For the first half of CD 1 we barely leave the homey writing that was a Victorian mainstay, but it is implicit that even while he was being conventional, something was brewing inside Nielsen that would eventually create a one-of-a-kind idiom that juggles the whimsical, puckish, mischievously unpredictable, sad, sarcastic, and wild. Curious to hear if this quixotic personality expressed itself at the piano, I leapt ahead to the late Music for Young and Old from 1930, the year before Nielsen’s death.
He spent nearly twenty years, from 1897 onward, without writing for the piano. Nielsen had limited abilities as a pianist, although he did appear twice playing his Humoresque-Bagatelles, op. 11, one of which, “The Doll’s March,” captured on a poor-sounding cylinder from the early 1920s, is the only document of him in performance. This background helps to explain the spareness and simplicity of Music for Young and Old, despite its late date. It is dominated, as the program notes describe it, by “the use of five-note figures in which the pianist does not need to cross hands or use thumb-under technique.” Paring technique down to this level, which would be suitable for young piano students, doesn’t preclude interesting music—I think back to the utter simplicity of the first books of Bartók’s Mikrokosmos.
Here, however, the inevitable conclusion is that Nielsen approached the piano chiefly to express melody and charm. Nowhere is he more quixotic than in the Sixth Symphony, where the title “Sinfonia semplice” is a mask for some enigmatic and still-puzzling writing. In the case of the 24 pieces that constitute Music for Young and Old, however, simplicity is its own virtue. His melodic gift is reduced to fairly narrow, often similar-sounding themes.
So where did Nielsen allow himself true freedom of imagination in his piano pieces? A more complete picture emerges by turning to three major works that he composed when he took up piano writing again in 1916: the Chaconne, op. 32, Theme with Variations, op. 40, and Suite, op. 45. He was ready to take cognizance of Modernism, especially in the Suite. At 51, this master of soaring melody and exaltation showed, contrary to his image, that his ears were open to the wider world of atonality, Expressionism, and complex density. Yet like late Stravinsky, Nielsen continues to sound like himself no matter what idiom he is exploring. As the program notes put it, “In these works, Nielsen established a distinctive, deeply personal piano style, characterized by strong contrasts, use of the piano’s entire dynamic ranges from ppp to fff, and a predominantly linear treatment.” Just as importantly, he now asked for advanced technical abilities as never before and which he didn’t possess himself.
This newfound daring and drama seem to cross-pollinate with his great orchestral pieces, although it is just as likely that echoes of Busoni or Ravel will sit quirkily next to the use of 12 tones (not that Nielsen adopted Schoenberg’s system). Audiences and critics weren’t prepared, and what followed was respect rather than popularity. Simpler and more straightforward but still modernist is how the program notes describe the Three Pieces, op. 59, from the late date of 1928. Nielsen originally called all three pieces Impromptus, which in the end he applied only to the first. Its scintillating opening makes it seem that he is about to give us something close to “Ondine” from Gaspard de la nuit before the music veers off in a new direction,
I find an important clue here. In Nielsen’s advanced, complex, and exploratory piano pieces, you often have the sense that he has started with the seed of an idea from another composer’s style that has caught his fancy, the Theme with Variations, for example, was sparked by studying Brahms, and then the idea gets released into improvised passages that are juxtaposed like brilliant mosaic tiles.
Nielsen was a great believer in organic form, which he traced to the rhythms of Nature. He once wrote, “Rhythm is life itself, revealing itself in fresh and whimsical irregularity…. It is a rhythmic celebration to let the eye follow the crests of waves in a field of grain or on the sea.” It is his celebration of fresh and whimsical irregularities that unites his most original piano music with the amazing originality of his symphonies. The young Nielsen’s instinctive turning away from late Romanticism opened a new but lonely path. He was sacrificing the support of a great tradition in classical music where continuous, logical development was essential. Elevating discontinuity and irregularities is the exact opposite.
That’s the journey Sandberg follows in her beautiful, knowing performances. Listening to the Impromptu from op. 59 reveals how penetrating her interpretations needed to be, because Nielsen’s whimsicality is beyond fixed rules of development. Like Sancho Panza trailing behind Don Quixote, the pianist surrenders to a master who might not be altogether sane, or who refuses to reveal the method in his maddest gestures.
Sandberg tells us that her fascination with Nielsen’s keyboard writing began when she played a four-hand arrangement of Symphony No.3, “Sinfonia espansiva.” CD 3 contains various piano arrangements that Nielsen made of other works, of which the most intriguing are the Dances from Aladdin, which include the overture and three other excerpts. The original orchestral versions will be familiar to Nielsen aficionados as his Orientalist incidental music written for a “dramatic fairy tale” for the theater between 1917 and 1919. The piano arrangements have their own verve and atmosphere.
I’ve tried to give the shape and flavor of this compendious collection, which means that dozens of individual pieces have been neglected. (One group alone, titled Souvenirs of Carl Nielsen, gathers 11 miniatures, few of which last as long as a minute.) Not everything is fresh and original, but that’s the fun of discovering the music that is. The extensive, readable documentation is exemplary, and OUR Recordings generously provides free streaming access to streams of all the music on the label’s website.
Besides being a milestone in Nielsen scholarship, this collection affords rich rewards for listeners who already hold him in affectionate regard as a free spirit and musical genius. Huntley Dent, Fanfare