BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
NIELSEN
The Ultimate solo piano collection

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It seems unlikely that anyone programming ‘The Ultimate Solo Piano Collection’ would fill it entirely with the piano works of Carl Nielsen, but marketeers don’t let facts get in the way of a good story. And let’s be fair. This is the subtitle and there’s an argument that this is, in some ways, the ultimate collection of Nielsen’s piano music – it’s certainly the most complete. Rikke Sandberg realised previous recordings didn’t give the full picture. ‘Out of a desire to preserve and document a national cultural heritage, I decided to record everything,’ she explains.

So across two albums, we hear his Romantic character miniatures, his larger-scale works like the neo-Baroque Chaconne, the Theme and Variations that emerged from an improvisation on Brahms, the six-movement suite written for pianist Artur Schnabel, as well as the pedagogical ‘five-finger’ Piano Music for Young and Old, written for children and amateurs. Sandberg could give us a greater variety of colour and nuance, but she is an engaging guide to these works, giving equal weight to both the slighter and more serious numbers.

To this known body of Nielsen piano works, Sandberg adds a third disc of mostly arrangements and incidental music, opening with excerpts from The Mother and ending with dances from Aladdin. The Mother was a 1921 play by Helge Rode, and Nielsen’s six shorter excerpts include a liltingly bittersweet beauty of ‘The Mist is Lifting’ and a graceful ‘Gramophone-Waltz’. The music from an ill-fated 1919 production of Aladdin found fresh life in Nielsen’s own orchestral suite, and Sandberg brings vigour and energy to the piano version. Rebecca Franks, August issue