Fanfare 4 *****
A monumental survey of the complete piano music of Denmark’s national composer

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 (add. 16). Suite, op. 45: “The Luciferian.” The Dream About “Silent Night.” Excerpts from “The Mother” for Piano (Add. 35). Dance of the Handmaidens from “Hagbarth and Signe” (Add. 32). Prelude to “Snefrid” for Piano (Add. 29). Elves’ Dance from “Sir Oluf He Rides” (Add. 31). Music from Otto Benzons’ play “Parents.” Oriental Festival March. Dances from “Aladdin” for Piano (Add. 34)  Rikke Sandberg (pn)  ONE RECORDINGS 8:22639-41 (3 CDs: 206:22) Reviewed from a WAV download: https://we.tl/t-FYTPA96qEO

Rikke Sandberg strikes again! In her last Fanfare appearance in 48:2, Colin Clarke interviewed her about her then-new recording of a two-piano version of Carl Nielsen’s Third Symphony, the “Sinfonia Espansiva,” and two excerpts from Nielsen’s opera Saul and David with her performing partner, Kristoffer Hyldig. Clarke, Ken Meltzer, James Harrington, Phillip Scott, and yours truly all gave the disc glowing reviews. In her interview she discussed how she searched for years for the two-piano reduction Nielsen had done from his Third Symphony, only to discover it in the Royal Library of Denmark in Copenhagen.
More recently Sandberg engaged on another major research project involving Nielsen’s music, specifically his works for solo piano. Nielsen wasn’t much of a writer for piano. His best-known works are his six symphonies, three concertos (one each for violin, flute, and clarinet—note that he didn’t write a piano concerto!), and two operas, Saul and David and Maskarade. Nielsen also wrote a number of songs for voice and piano, of which, as Sandberg says in her liner notes, “High and low alike have grown up with his children’s songs.”
Sandberg said, “It was a major decision, but also an obvious one, to set out to record all of Carl Nielsen’s piano music. … His music has filled my life for as long as I can remember, and regardless of whether some of the piano music was less familiar territory to me than other, and regardless of the music’s expansive, and sometimes frustrating, density and complexity, I have never experienced such an enchanting evolution in understanding, perceiving, and experiencing as I have with Carl Nielsen’s music.”
As presented by Sandberg, Nielsen’s piano music constitutes a mixed bag. They include long works of short movements with titles like Five Piano Pieces (op. 3), Souvenirs from Carl Nielsen: 11 Small Piano Pieces, and Piano Music for Young and Old: 24 Five-Finger Pieces in All Keys that sound like Nielsen intended them as what the Germans call Hausmusik. That means music meant to be purchased in score and played at home by talented amateurs for their own entertainment. The longest movement in Souvenirs is 1:06 and only the first movement of Five Piano Pieces and the last movement of Piano Music for Young and Old go over two minutes.
Sandberg quotes Nielsen himself as saying of Piano Music for Young and Old, “I have indeed not exceeded the five-finger range (the span of a fifth) in these small pieces, but within these modest limits, I have sought, through modulatory and polyphonic elements, to meet a general contemporary desire to approach the great musical literature somewhat better prepared, and perhaps also with quicker understanding.” The release also includes fragmentary single-movement pieces with titles like “Welcome to 20 Della Grazia, Little Marie!” (20 seconds), “Prelude for the New Century” (1:46), “The Dream of ‘Silent Night’” (an Ivesian rewrite of the standard carol, 3:13), and “Piano Piece” (41 seconds).
It’s important to remember that before the advent of recordings in the early 20th century the only ways to be able to enjoy music in your home were either to be rich enough to hire people to play it for you or to be skilled enough to play it yourself. Sandberg seems to acknowledge that this was the intended market for much of this music when she writes, “[S]everal of these small movements and dances are well suited to advanced music-school students.” And yet there are also some major pieces here, including the op. 52 Chaconne, the op. 40 Theme with Variations, the op. 59 Three Piano Pieces, and the op. 45 suite, “The Luciferian”—meant not as a reference to the devil, but to the bringer of light, and dedicated to Artur Schnabel—that are as good, and as challenging, as anything Debussy, Prokofiev, or Nielsen’s other contemporaries were turning out.
The third CD in Sandberg’s collection consists of piano reductions of works Nielsen wrote as incidental music for plays. These include six selections from his score for Helge Rode’s The Mother, five from Adam Oehlenschläger’s Aladdin (six if you count the Oriental Festival March, the only part of the Aladdin score published during Nielsen’s lifetime), and one piece each from Holger Drachmann’s Snefrid, Oehlenschläger’s Hagbarth and Signe, Drachmann’s Sir Oluf Rides, and Otto Benzon’s Parents.
It shouldn’t be surprising that the music Nielsen wrote for plays is more derivative than the pieces he came up with on his own. The first movement of the suite from The Mother sounds like Beethoven’s Moonlight sonata, while the second, the “Gramophone-Waltz” (written as the music heard on a record player as part of the play), is a Strauss waltz in all but name and national origin. The suite from The Mother closes with a march that sounds like Sousa meets Suppé. Even the non-theatrical pieces sometimes evoke other composers: the slow second (“Poco moderato”) and fourth (“Allegretto innocente”) movements of the Luciferian Suite sound like Debussy and the finale is positively Lisztian.
Nonetheless, there are plenty of pieces here that could only be by Nielsen, and Rikke Sandberg acquits herself marvelously throughout the album. Presenting Nielsen’s complete piano oeuvre was not a task for the faint of heart, but Sandberg rises to the challenge and she gets magnificent sound quality from Preben Iwan and the technical crew at OUR Recordings. Definitely recommended, Mark Gabrish Conlan