Joel Lazar wrote in answer to me:

>I've been a passionate Nielsen fan since the early 1950s and have been
>conducting Nielsen since the early1970s, including performances of the
>orchestral music all over the US completing Horenstein's recording of "Saul
>and David" with the Danish National Orchestra in Copenhagen....  There are
>of course many valuable lessons to be learned from the older performances
>of Nielsen recorded in Denmark, which, like historical recordings of
>anything else, I enjoy hearing....Many of my Danish friends feel in fact
>that the lack of world-class native conductors during the interwar years
>did a great deal to keep his music under wraps until the mid1950s....
>Personally I've always admired Paavo Berglund's Nieslen performances.

If you meant to impress me, I am duly impressed and thank you for probably
the most thoughtful posting on Nielsen I've read on this board.  When you
love something as I do Nielsen's works, you only want Nielsen to be heard.
If your posting will spread the word and make it possible for me before
I am lame, deaf and dumb to hear Nielsen live, then whatever I wrote to
elicit your obviously passionate word on Nielsen was worth it, right or
wrong.  What I cannot understand is the amount of time and space recording
companies and music lovers, here and in general, devote to composers who
are "eh," and will not survive this generation and Nielsen CDs have all
but disappeared from the record bins and certainly his music from concert
programs.  Bernstein was an oddball.  He was often better than he
consciously knew.  So much of what he did and said publicly has the
excitement of a moth-eaten circus, but when he conducted often he so
thoroughly contradicted himself that he got it right, even when mainly
trying to flatter a audience, as he may have the Danes.  I know when I went
to Denmark now a generation ago and stayed with Danes, they didn't know
Nielsen then nor were they the least complimented by my enthusiasm.  And
yet they are the friendliest and most decent people on the whole I met
in Europe on that trip.  I have always thought that one of the reasons
Nielsen has not come into his own.  The English have made an icon of Vaughn
Williams, and a fine composer he most certainly is, one of the few who will
survive this century.  But he is a ripple compared to Nielsen's earthquake.
It is not salesmanship.  It is love of all things English.  The Danes
wrongly view their cosmopolitanism as modesty.  It isn't.  It is stupidity
and has the effect of denying the rest of the world an acquaintance with
Nielsen.  How can we comprehend the stranger until we first know our
own family? This is a perverse age.  If music is really nourishing and
enjoyable without the explanation of academicians and critics, it must be
suspect.  Imagine the contemporaries of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven totally
ignoring their music and believing their only talented contemporaries were
the voice of the age.  That is how the classical music of this century will
look a hundred years from now.  What can be done to hasten the inevitable?
Finally, I couldn't be more fully in agreement with anything in music than
this observation by Joel Lazar.  I never confused Nielsen with anyone else.
He had a unique voice right from the start.  "With all respect to my much
missed friend, the late Robert Simpson, comparisons with Beethoven aren't
germane to performances of Nielsen-anybody who knows the entire oeuvre
hears the individuality of voice even in the First Symphony."

Andrew Carlan
"Standing Up For Nielsen"