Fanfare 3 (US)

Five stars: (Max) Well-played version of Nielsen’s Third Symphony, other works in his own two-piano arrangements

IELSEN Saul and David: Prelude to the Fourth Act, Battle Music with the Curtain Down. Symphony No. 3. NIELSEN/JØRGENSEN (arr. Hyldig) Højby Rifle Club March.  Rikke Sandberg, Kristoffer Hyldig (pn)  OUR 8.226923 (45:44)

“Who has not dreamt of chancing upon a completely unknown piece of music up in an old attic by one of the really great masters?” So begin pianist Rikke Sandberg’s rather breathless liner notes to this new album of four-handed piano music by the great Danish symphonist Carl Nielsen (1865-1931). It’s true that none of the music heard here, except for the insignificant three-minute pop march at the end, is actually new. Nielsen’s Third Symphony, subtitled “Sinfonia Espansiva” (the word “Espansiva” is used as the overall title of this album) is well known in its orchestral original. Though Nielsen’s opera Saul and David (based on the Bible story) is less familiar, it’s been recorded several times and so is also not exactly terra incognita to record collectors.
What makes this album unusual is that – at least for the most part – the four-hand piano arrangements heard here were by Carl Nielsen himself. According to Sandberg, “Nielsen felt the need to promote his symphony to various conductors and musical directors and therefore performed it, often with the pianist Henrik Knudsen, his good friend and colleague, at his side.” Sandberg and Kristoffer Hyldig had heard rumors for years of the existence of a piano-duo edition of the Third Symphony, and they finally found it in the Royal Library of Denmark. The library also had the vocal-piano score of Saul and David, which for the most part had been prepared by Knudsen from Nielsen’s orchestral original, but the two sections excerpted here were arranged by Nielsen himself and called for a second pianist.
Actually, composing an orchestral piece for one or two pianos and then doing the orchestration from that was not an unusual practice in 1910-1911, when Nielsen worked on the Third Symphony. Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1913) was composed that way, as was Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (1924). Indeed, when Stravinsky first demonstrated The Rite of Spring to impresario Sergei Diaghilev and choreographer Rudolf Nijinsky, he played the two-piano version with Claude Debussy as second pianist – and what wouldn’t we give for a recording of that? And Gershwin, strapped for time and raised in the Broadway tradition that regarded composition and orchestration as different skill sets, famously farmed out the orchestration of Rhapsody in Blue to Paul Whiteman’s arranger, Ferde Grofé.
It’s true that what is heard here is not, note-for-note, what Carl Nielsen wrote. “Kristoffer and I have developed certain modifications,” Sandberg admits in his liner notes. “We have added certain parts from the orchestral score which we felt were lacking, have octavated [sic] certain passages that seemed rather thin, and corrected harmonies and notes that diverged from the orchestral score.” Hyldig also tweaked the Saul and David excerpts, adding some of the original vocal parts “to improve the form, cohesion and harmony.” And, though it’s the shortest piece on the album, the Højby Rifle Club March – composed for the Tivoli Amusement Park in Copenhagen, which still exists – needed the most editorial help.
First, it’s not altogether clear whether it was composed by Nielsen, by his father Niels Jørgensen, or both in collaboration. And in case you were wondering why, when they were father and son, they ended up with different last names, Nielsen biographer Knud Ketting explained it in his essay on the Carl Nielsen Society’s website. It seems that, though the Danish Ministry of Church Affairs had decreed as early as 1856 – nine years before Nielsen’s birth – that Danish babies should be christened with the same last names as their fathers, word didn’t always filter down to the remotest parishes, including the one on the Danish island of Funen where Nielsen was born. Some pastors continued to christen children according to the old “patronymic” style, in which their last name would be based on their father’s first name, so our composer entered the world literally as “Carl, Niels’s son.”
Also, according to Sandberg, Højby Rifle Club March had to be pieced together from a “fragmentary and deficient” score. “But the idea was there, and the story behind it, both regarding Klaus Berntsen, to whom the Højby Rifle Club March was dedicated, and regarding the theory that it is the only composition by Carl Nielsen’s father, Neils ‘Painter’ Jørgensen, were just too good to ignore.” In this context, the march comes off as a perfectly competent but not especially moving piece of light music, strongly reminiscent of the “Turkish March” from Beethoven’s The Ruins of Athens and Franz von Suppé’s Light Cavalry Overture.
But the real treasures here are the Symphony No. 3 and the two Saul and David excerpts in their two-piano form. Though Nielsen originally wrote the arrangements for piano four-hands, Sandberg and Hyldig chose to play them on two separate pianos of different brands: a Steinway for the upper register and a Fazioli for the lower because, as Sandberg explained, it “has an incredibly rich and round bass.” Heard in its two-piano form, the Symphony No. 3 is darker, craggier and more “Scandinavian” than as a piece for orchestra, where Nielsen’s creative and often brass-heavy style softens its edges a bit.
More than most composers, Nielsen comes off differently based on who’s playing him – Jascha Horenstein’s and Herbert Blomstedt’s recordings of Symphony No. 5 sound almost like different pieces of music – and it’s nice not only to hear the quite different sound worlds evoked by the orchestral and duo-piano versions of Symphony No. 3 but to hear the piano version as well played and recorded as it is here. Dare we hope that similar four-hands versions of Nielsen’s other symphonies will turn up? Mark Gabrish Conlan
Five stars: Well-played version of Nielsen’s Third Symphony, other works in his own two-piano