So far Nielsen's music to Adam Oehlenschlager's Aladdin has been known only from the (relatively familiar) seven-movement suite, Op. 34, which both Myung-Whun Chung (BIS, 5/84) and Tamas Veto have recorded (Unicorn-Kanchana, 6/86). Both are still available. However, the suite only comprises about 20 minutes of music, which is little more than a quarter of Nielsen's original score. Torben Schousboe, the leading authority on the composer, tells us in his admirable note that Nielsen's score (which he prepared for his recording) comprised no fewer than 275 pages of music. In all there are some 31 pieces, which makes it longer than Sibelius's music for The Tempest, though no one would pretend that it is of comparable quality.
Aladdin comes from 1917-18, and was commissioned for a particularly lavish production of the play at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen. More than half the music consists of orchestral interludes to accompany processions and dances, most of which come in the Third Act. Many are delightful and endearing, and once heard difficult to get out of one's head. Thirteen of the items are designed as background to spoken melodrama; some serve to evoke atmosphere and are of slender musical substance. Robert Simpson summed the work up in his Nielsen monograph: ''The market-square in Isfahan where four orchestras play in four different tempi suggesting marvellously the clashing colours, movements and sounds of an eastern market-place, is undoubtedly the most striking and original part of the music. Some of it is not very interesting (the rather commonplace Blackamoors' Dance, for instance) but most is intensely perceptive and colourful.'' And I must say that I found far more to delight me here than I had expected. It is often very colourful; full of characteristic Nielsenesque touches, and although it is not the composer at his very best, it offers many irresistible delights.'