Carl Nielsen said: “Those who throw the best fist will be remembered longest. Beethoven, Michelangelo, Bach, Berlioz and the like have given their era a black eye.” So why is it that the Danish composer still doesn’t enjoy the box-office impact of Sibelius, Strauss and Mahler, the heavy-hitters from his own epoch? It’s not that performances of Nielsen’s symphonies are completely uncommon. But it takes a special occasion, in this case, the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth, to prompt a complete survey of all six symphonies within the space of a fortnight.
The conductor John Storgårds – whose Sibelius cycle was among the BBC Philharmonic’s greatest recent achievements – suggests that there’s a “craziness” to Nielsen’s music that sets him apart from his cooler, more introverted Finnish counterpart. Listening to the first instalment, one wonders if it is Nielsen’s sheer bloody-mindedness that puts people off. The most notorious act of self-sabotage is the freeform snare drum solo from the Fifth (that’s to come on Saturday). But the defiantly “wrong” C major chord that opens the First Symphony – supposedly in G minor – destabilises Nielsen’s symphonic career from the very first downbeat.
Storgårds’s performance was certainly not lacking in drama. There’s no more visceral rhythm assault in music – the Rite of Spring included – to match the pulverising duel of the twin timpanists at the climax of the Fourth; or anything as patently bizarre as the sudden interpolations of frenzied, single-note scrubbing on the violas that sounds less like a passage of music than a sequence of cancelled bars in which the musicians attempt to interpret the crossings-out.
An accompanying cycle-within-a-cycle is devoted to Mahler’s 12 orchestral settings of Das Knaben Wunderhorn poems. Roderick Williams’s delivery was exemplary, though it was unusual to find one of Nielsen’s more popular peers reduced, for once, to the status of a sideshow.
• At Bridgewater Hall on 13 and 18 June. Box office: 0161-907 9000.
Listen again on iPlayer.
