This religious mystery opera by Rued Laggard stars Sten Byriel, Anne Margrethe Dahl, Paul Elming, and Helene Gjerris, with teh Danish National Symphony Orchestra & Choir.

Johan Reuter, Gert Henning-Jensen, Elisabeth Jansson, Sten Byreil, Gitta-Maria Sjoberg, Lars Waage, Morgens Gert Hansen, Bengt-Ola Morguy, and Djina Mai-Mai star in this Royal Danish Orchestra production of the Bo Holten opera conducted by the composer.

With this new release, Danish musicians Henrik Dam Thomsen and Ulrich Staerk explore the music of four great French composers, Debussy, Faure, Vierne, and Saint-Saens. This is truly a unique album, as it is being released in conjunction with the special album app “French Pieces,” which puts the music together with videos, bonus tracks, and essays about the composers and performers, and can be downloaded in App Store or Google Play. “Henrik Dam Thomsen is a splendid player.” (Gramophone) “Thomsen is a Rolls Royce among players.” (Classic FM Magazine)

The staging of Thomas Agerfeldt Olesen's opera The Picture of Dorian Gray is one of the Danish National Opera's bravest ventures in recent years. A choreographed opera with no singers on stage - based on Oscar Wilde's most controversial novel. Like Wilde's novel, Agerfeldt Olesen's opera balances between reality and dream or imagination. Consequently, both sounds from the world of yesterday and outbreaks of the musical genre are present in teh score, though primarily expressing the composer's own distinctive sound.

The Danish composer Niels la Cour (b. 1944) has the whole sacred music tradition as a natural starting point in his striving for beauty, timelessness and suprapersonal sublimity. The expressive balance, internal consistency and calm, organically breathing melodic basis of the music make it perfect for the church interior, as clearly shown by this recording from the Trinitatis Church in Copenhagen with the organ soloist Bine Bryndorf and the chamber choir Trinitatis Kantori.

GRAM: Orchestral Works, Vol. 2 - Symphonies Nos. 2 and 3, Av

GRAM: Orchestral Works, Vol. 1

Red is the color of blood, the color of danger, and the color of temptation. Hans Christian Andersen took the symbolism to a new extreme of cruelty in The Red Shoes- an ancient folk tale here given a modern musical reworking by Siobhan Lamb and the Suoni Ensemble. Composer Siobhan Lamb trained as a classical flautist at the Royal Academy of Music in London. As a composer, Siobhan Lamb enjoys writing for a variety of ensembles. Her music has a strong sense of narrative at it's core. The Red Shoes is written for children and young people, but can also be enjoyed by adults with an interest in the universe of H.C. Andersen's fairytales and new music. Each member of the Suoni Ensemble is hand-picked for their unique sound quality and their desire to tell stories through music making. In this recording the ensemble features world famous percussionist Marilyn Mazur, who has performed with musicians like Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter and Jan Garbarek.

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

MOZART Symphonies Nos. 1, 4–31, 33–36, 39–41. Symphonies, K 19a, 42a, 45a–b, 73l–n, 73q, 111b • Ádám Fischer, cond; Danish Natl CO • DACAPO 8.201201 (12 CDs: 716:42)

I mentioned in my review of a single disc from this series, which included symphonies Nos. 28–30 (Fanfare 34:4), that I didn’t think that Ádám Fischer’s performances captured “Mozart’s drama as well as they capture his elegance,” but added the caveat that it’s difficult to gauge an entire series of symphonies by one CD. Alas, in later reviewing the disc including symphonies Nos. 31, 33, and 34, I had the opposite feeling, that Fischer was making a “race to the finish line” and playing the symphonies too quickly. Now, as it so happened, I reviewed those two discs about two years apart, and so did not have the first still on hand to compare to the second, or to think about the differences in approach. But now I have the full set of 45 symphonies to review, and my feelings have changed. Now I am inclined to agree with Patrick Rucker, who gave a rave review to the single disc of symphonies Nos. 15–18 in Fanfare 31:1 (a disc reviewed, I believe, before I joined the magazine staff), stating that he was “grasping for superlatives.”

The difference? Listening to the entire series in chronological sequence. By doing so, I noted that, despite an overall theatrical approach to these symphonies (in the liner notes, Fischer admits that he tends to think of orchestral music “operatically,” i.e., finding a dramatic theme or thread in the music that he then tries to bring out), he does make distinctions between the earlier and the later symphonies. Reducing his approach to a few basics, he plays the earlier symphonies with equal drama and electricity but with far fewer changes in dynamics and fewer rubato touches. In addition, I was able to download the scores of four of the symphonies—two of the most famous late works (40 and 41) and two early symphonies (Nos. 5 and 15, chosen pretty much at random)—and although these are not up-to-date, verified, Urtext scores like the ones Fischer worked from, they do include dynamics markings. And, as any number of conductors of the past have mentioned, they do not tell you what to do between the forte here and the piano four or six bars later (or vice versa). You are expected to follow your own good taste in approaching them.

Perhaps another deciding factor for me was in hearing Philippe Herreweghe’s more dynamic performances of symphonies Nos. 39 and 41 and, believe it or not, Bruno Walter’s historic performances of symphonies Nos. 39–41. Despite Walter’s slower tempos (and richer string sound), he actually elicited much more nuance and detail from those symphonies than did Jaap ter Linden, whose set I gave a good review to and suggested at the time that it was a fine historically-informed set of the Mozart symphonies. But, to be honest, what really sold me on Fischer’s approach were his performances of the early, lesser-known, oft-neglected, and unnumbered symphonies. Each and every one of them sounded as if it was just bursting with excitement, yet not too much that it overpowered the music on the printed page.

Moreover, what struck me in the single disc of symphonies 31, 33 and 34 as too fast now, suddenly, made sense in context. And, for the several Toscanini-bashers out there, I found it almost comical to note that Fischer takes the Finale of the “Jupiter” Symphony at virtually the same tempo that they consider “too fast.” The difference, of course, is that musicians of the 1940s and 50s weren’t used to playing Mozart this swiftly, and so they tended to sound pressed, whereas Fischer’s Danish National Chamber Orchestra skips through the music deftly and nimbly, like snow rabbits dashing across the landscape. It’s the comfort level of the executants that makes the difference, then, not the “wrong” tempo.

A good example of Fischer’s approach is CD 3, where he presents no less that four symphonies in a row that are all in the key of D Major (K 73l, m, n, and q). It would have been very easy for him, and the orchestra, to simply slip into an all-purpose style for these works, which of course would make them sound pretty much the same, yet he continually varies his approach from work to work. I do, however, caution the listener to approach this set one CD at a time. That is what I did, listening on consecutive nights to only one CD per evening, and it worked out pretty well. You get a better feel for the magnitude of Fischer’s achievement that way, and you are being fairer to both him and the Danish orchestra, whose players helped prod him on to take chances with the music and do things differently from the norm. After all, this was a seven-year project for them. These symphonies did not just get all rehearsed and recorded within a year or two.

I should also point out the work that went into Symphony No. 15, one of the four I obtained scores of. In the notes, Fischer asserts that if this work had not been by Mozart, who wrote so many symphonies and so many of good quality, it would probably be a much better known work, possibly a repertoire staple. Just reading the score, the music does look promising but certainly not brilliant. The first movement, for instance, is in a quick 3/4 time, featuring a jagged melody with the usual wide-ranging melodic leaps. From the first bar, the dynamics marking is forte, which changes to piano at bar 13, then back to forte at bar 22, piano again at bar 25, forte on the first beat of bar 30 with a sudden fp on the second beat (a half note played by the oboes, trumpets, and first violins, while the second violins play 16ths and the violas, cellos, and basses play eighth notes). It’s all pretty cut-and-dry, you might say, and this is how most conductors play it. Fischer adds a little burst of extra volume at the top of bar 5, when the agitated strings play against long-held notes by oboes and trumpets, and there are all sorts of little gradations of sound in various places, including slight crescendos to emphasize the musical drama. More interestingly, none of this sounds particularly fussy; if you didn’t have the score in front of you, or if you hadn’t heard any number of flat-response historically-informed performances, you’d think that this is simply the way the music goes. Toscanini once said it isn’t the f here or the p there that’s difficult to gauge, but what to do in between. Sadly, Toscanini paid little attention to most of Mozart’s symphonies because, except for the last three, he found most of them boring: “Is always beautiful, but always the same!” In Fischer’s performances, nothing is “always the same.” In the Andante of this Symphony, for instance, there are no dynamics markings at all, yet Fischer plays it at a moderate mp with further gradations down to p or pp and back again. By such means does he create and sustain interest.

The notes also explain the reason why the music sounds so vibrant and alive: His string players all use steel strings, which gives the music a consistently “edgy” quality that reveals, as Fischer put it, Mozart’s “earthily honest side.” The more you think about it, the more this makes sense, since Mozart was strongly influenced by both Haydn and C. P. E. Bach, both of whom exploited an earthy, dramatic quality in their symphonies.

Probably the most difficult aspect of the earlier symphonies to overcome was the monotony of orchestration. Clarinets, horns, and other instruments only begin to appear in Mozart’s symphonies later on; earlier, the composer had to rely on his ingenuity of counter-rhythms and occasional harmonic changes to sustain interest, and unlike Haydn, Mozart almost invariably sought the widest possible popularity for his music (perhaps one of the reasons why Toscanini found it “always the same”). Yet, as the notes also point out, in Mozart’s day no one bothered to listen to music more than three years old as a rule. It was all about what was new, not what had come before. No one gave a hoot back then about “historical performance practice” because they didn’t want it and wouldn’t have listened if you gave it to them.

I still feel that occasional movements, such as the Andantes of the “Paris” Symphony and No. 39, are a shade too fast for my taste, but in the context of Fischer’s overall musical conception what he plays works very well. I can now accept what I hear in those later symphonies because my tolerance was built up through what he did with the numerous early works. In short, I have taken this symphonic journey with Fischer, the only difference being that I did it in 12 nights rather than in seven years.

I have now replaced the Jaap ter Linden set of Mozart symphonies on my shelf with this one. I strongly urge you to give them a listen and see if you don’t agree.

FANFARE: Lynn René Bayley

Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen (1932-2016) managed to unite every faction of progressive Danish music in admiration. After their acclaimed first volume in this new chronological cycle of the composer's complete string quartets, the Nordic String Quartet arrive at the works that reveal the composer's musical imagination in all it's unbridled joy, brilliance and eccentricity. Works spanning 27 years, including three written for the world-famous Kronos Quartet, see the composer toying with form, sparring with nature and grappling with seemingly irreconcilable opposites.

Bára Gísladóttir (b. 1989) considers sounds, instruments, and ensembles as living organisms. In COR, Hringla, and VAPE, the Icelandic composer and double bassist engages with the largest musical organism of all: the symphony orchestra. Inspired by death metal or techno as much as by Scelsi or Penderecki, the foreboding atmosphere of her music is cut through with irony, puns, and black humor. After all, organisms themselves – especially human bodies – contain the potential for both comic excess and self-annihilation. In these three works, we follow Gísladóttir’s fascination with language and coincidence; we hear an uncompromising interrogation of the body’s excesses and ailments; and, most of all, we see life, vaporous and between states, neither dark nor light.

Anders Koppel’s borderless view of music has taken in everything from psychedelic rock to world music and avant-garde concert pieces. But his gregarious musical aesthetic has found a special home in the world of the instrumental concerto, a genre whose exchange of energies continues to inspire him. Three of Koppel's most charming concertos are heard here in new recordings from the musicians who inspired them and the Danish Sinfonietta, that commissioned and first performed them.

Joachim Andersen (1847–1909) charted an exceptionally diverse path in his career. At the heart of it, he stood as a founding member of the Berlin Philharmonic, adroitly balancing roles as a conductor and a solo flautist of great renown. His legacy includes the composition of eight volumes of etudes, now considered a cornerstone in the global flautist repertoire. Andersen emerges as a composer deeply rooted in his era, a sentiment vividly expressed through the enchanting and emotionally resonant tapestry of his works for flute and piano. This essence springs to life in this 2-CD set, impeccably interpreted by Alena Walentin and Berit Johansen Tange.

Rued Langgaard is a composer who surprises. Having experienced one of his works, it is very likely that the next one you encounter will be entirely different. This is true of his songs to Danish texts, some of which are now available for the first time on record. In these songs, from his early days as a hyper-talented teenager through to his first works as a young visionary in his early 20s, we come close to him, both as a composer and as a human being.

REVIEW:

These are not among Langgaard’s most complex and modern works, but in a way using tonality and generally recognizable forms will give listeners, particularly those who have never heard Langgaard’s music before, a good idea of his working methods.

The soprano's soft singing in “Evening wraps its cloak of twilight” is absolutely exquisite, a treat for the ears, each note sounding like a silver bell. I could hear her voice in my mind’s ear for an hour after listening to this CD, and yes, that is a tribute to her exquisite vocal quality.

-- The Art Music Lounge