Thomas Jensen Legacy now at Vol. 20

There was no more unprejudiced or enthusiastic promoter of Danish music than Thomas Jensen. Twelve composers are featured here, in styles ranging from Romantic ballet to modernist oratorio. Nearly all the recordings are issued for the first time ever since they were originally broadcast. Taken together, they present a panoramic picture of Danish music in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Friedrich Kuhlau is known as Beethoven’s strongest advocate in Denmark and the man who wrote Elverhøj. But Kuhlau was first and foremost a pianist, one whose works for the instrument have a depth and character of their own. In the first of a new series, Marie-Luise Bodendorff reassesses Kuhlau’s contribution to the piano literature with fresh, muscular performances of music including the previously unrecorded Divertissement, Op. 37. Marie-Luise Bodendorff took her first piano lessons at the age of five and was admitted to the Hochschule fur Musik in Karlsruhe at the age of 10. From 2002 to 2007 she studied with Russian piano authority Vladimir Krainev at the Hannover University of Music, Drama, and Media. She currently resides in Copenhagen, Denmark, and has been a part time professor of piano at the Royal Danish Academy of Music since 2016.

Born in Hamburg in 1786, the son of a military bandsman, Friedrich Kuhlau showed early musical promise and took lessons with a student of CPE Bach. When Napoleon’s troops invaded Hamburg in 1810, the 24-year-old Kuhlau fled with his family to Copenhagen, and there he made his name as a pianist and composer to the royal court. Taking Danish citizenship in 1813, he worked in the vanguard of the country’s fast-moving cultural scene, enjoying huge success as a composer of operas and incidental music. Kuhlau was himself a flautist of modest accomplishment, but the popularity of salon culture in Denmark increased the demand for flute and piano music - which were both fashionable at the time - to such an extent that Kuhlau complained, in a letter to his publisher in 1829, about having too many commissions. While a flautist of modest accomplishment himself, Kuhlau wrote with unfailing craft, sympathy and imagination for the instrument and before their publication he submitted his new works for approval from the principal flautist of the Court Chapel’s orchestra. The seven trios recorded here display a surprising variety of texture and mood. Even the trio of Op.13 works from 1815 ranges from the Baroque manners of No.3’s Adagio to a much grander scale of expression in the slow introduction which opens the curtain on No.1 and on the set as a whole. There is a dashing, Mendelssohnian quality to both the melodies and the sunny disposition of the Op.86 set from 1827 which itself is set aside for a more intense, Beethovenian argument in the grand trio Op.90. In 2015 three Asian flautists founded the Flute East Trio at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music in Berlin.

In the late-classical era, an Edinburgh publisher commissioned the most famous composers in continental Europe to orchestrate traditional Scottish folk songs in their original English. A lush sampling of this music is performed here by Makaris, a new early-music super-group headed by soprano Fiona Gillespie. (Olde Focus)

Friederich Kuhlau was among the most important early Romantic composers in Denmark, becoming known as the ‘Danish Beethoven’ for his popular works for flute. The etude-like Piano Sonata, Op. 127 reveals a deep expressiveness reminiscent of Chopin’s studies, while the sophisticated Piano Sonata, Op. 8a shows Kuhlau’s contemplative, darker side before closing with typical virtuoso esprit. The charm and elegance of the Sonatina, Op. 21 No. 1 has delighted piano students for generations. Jens Luhr was born in the same town as Friedrich Kuhlau, Uelzen, in northern Germany. There at the local music school, Luhr played- along with many other young piano students- the Kuhlau Sonatinas. He went on to study at the prestigious conservatories of music in Hannover, Wurzburg, Basle, and Leipzig. Luhr is known as a soloist and chamber musician, as well as being an interpreter of contemporary music, playing or taking part in several premieres. In 2012 and 2014 he won second prize at the International Music Competition of France in the highest category for pianists.

The German composer Friedrich Kuhlau (1786-1832) fled to Denmark as a young man and with his strong cosmopolitan personality became a loner – and at the same time a key figure – in the Danish Golden Age. Kuhlau championed new tones in Danish music, and his melodically appealing violin sonatas were the first Danish sonatas in the Romantic style. With this recording Duo Åstrand/Salo lends new luster to music that has only rarely been performed in our time.