Andrew Carlan remarked:[abridged at both ends]

>...I would be careful with Nielsen, whose sound is so different from
>his contemporaries.  That is why the historical recordings play a special
>importance for grabbing the newcomer to this most approachable of twentieth
>century composers.  Even Danes today have lost the link back to Nielsen.
>
>Listen to the Danacord or Dutton recordings of the symphonies with
>conductors who spoke the musical language Nielsen did.  It is very tricky
>to strike a balance between the muscularity in Nielsen and a certain
>suppleness or grace that gymnasts display.  The symphonies are not simply
>continuations of Beethoven, although they are certainly rooted in the
>tradition....

I really can't agree with this:  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, and conducting other Nielsen in Copenhagen.
I know this repertoire extremely well and have heard it played by a
remarkable range of groups, American, British and Continental.

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 and learning from, but if
the same qualities don't show up in contemporary performances the issue
is not the intrinsic non-exportability of the music, but the level of
insight the non-Danish conductor brings to it.  I would not care to suggest
any of the integral Nielsen sets Mr.  Carlan recommends, as I find nothing
particularly interesting about them either in terms of continuing the
Nielsen "tradition" or in terms of offering a new set of performance values
to replace those.  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.  They were delighted (and
exasperated) with Bernstein's flirtation with Nielsen and overjoyed that
Horenstein in his Copenhagen debut was willing to undertake "Saul and
David"-they saw such interest as vindication of the universality of the
music.

Personally I've always admired Paavo Berglund's Nieslen performances,
heard live many times in London with the Bournemouth Symphony in the early
1970s as well as an impressive Fifth with the National Symphony here in
Washington about ten years back and on his complete recorded set with the
Royal Danish Orchestra--but then I like most of what Berglund does in any
repertoire, and it has very little to do with his Finnish ancestry.

There are also many spectacular individual Nielsen performances on records
of all sorts as well, Horenstein's Third, Fifth and Sixth, of course, come
first to mind.  Barbirolli's Fourth, I, too would be careful with Nielsen
at any price--boring conductors usually don't do Nielsen any better than
they do anything else.

Specialists tend to conduct everything else worse, and their specialties
marginally better 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 and addresses that aspect, even though in
Nielsen's day allusions to a range of Scandinavian Kleinmeister might have
been very obvious.  Serious musicians don't conduct Nielsen or anything
else "as if" it were something else, or without reference to that which is
on the page.  If this sounds circular in logic, I apologize.  Tradition,
whether Viennese, American vernacular or French has its uses but it is no
substitute for skill and insight.

Joel Lazar
Conductor, Bethesda MD
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