Carl Nielsen cited Christian Horneman (1840-1906) as a vitally fresh voice in Danish music: will this disc tell us why? The booklet-notes eschew any discussion of Horneman’s music to discuss his frustrated life – ‘full of ideas and initiatives, but unfortunately few of them endured very long’ – and it’s tempting if facile to say the same of his work. It’s hard to understand what, apart from creative paralysis, could have caused Horneman to be six years late in delivering the music for The Contest with the Muses (1896) if the rest of it is on a level with these four extracts, the highlight of which is a ‘mystical’ hymn to Apollo for two-part female chorus along the lines of Brahms’s Op 17 set but with more parallel thirds. Dating from his twenties, the Hero’s Life overture is a broken-backed affair (done with swashbuckling vigour by this orchestra and Michael Schønwandt – Chandos, 2/96) which does not compare well to Danish concert overtures of similarly grand dramatic designs but tauter means such as Gade’s Hamlet, JPE Hartmann’s Hakon Jarl or Lange-Müller’s Viking Blood. In the suite from Kalanus, both the resort to repeated figures at celebratory junctures and the evident Goethe-derived fascination with the mystic East remind me of Schumann’s Peri, but not in Horneman’s favour. On a BIS CD, Owain Arwel Hughes cherry-picks the most intriguing movement of the suite, which evokes the feverish dreams of the eponymous Indian sage. Gustavsson’s much quicker tempo conveys a certain restlessness but of a limited, superficially physical nature (‘the blanketing tickles, you feel like mixed pickles’ according to Iolanthe’s Lord Chancellor), whereas Hughes uncovers a steadily mounting, proto-Sibelian disenchantment. The neat playing and close recording of the new disc bring a classicising tendency, and I feel not to Horneman’s advantage. Until his opera Aladdin receives a complete recording, the Gurre-Suite remains the most convincing demonstration of his gifts. Composed 18 years after Jens Peter Jacobsen’s poem and the same year that Schoenberg began his setting, it crystallises the passion and desperation of this most gloomily Danish of legends into four movements from incidental music for a play; Gustavsson points the rhythms well enough but I’d still turn to Hughes or, better still, Schønwandt, who alone has recorded the complete score, for a more persuasively Romantic approach.