Had Elgar not made records, we would have cherished Sir Adrian Boult and Sir John Barbirolli as the torch-bearers of the Elgar tradition. The three conductors represented here stand in the same relation to Nielsen: they were close to him and provide a unique link with his music. Thomas Jensen had played under his baton, and is reputed to have had a particularly good memory of Nielsen's own tempos. As I said on the first appearance of these recordings, they call for tolerance as regards technical quality but this is of little moment when set against the insights these performances give us. There is one important difference this time round: Erik Tuxen's 1950 Edinburgh Festival performance of the Fifth Symphony is replaced by a later account given in Paris in 1955, the earlier tape was in poor condition and the orchestral sound is now better focused. However, the opening is completely ruined by disruptive coughing. A pity that Danacord could not have persuaded EMI to license Tuxen's 1950 commercial recording (10/50—nla). The first thing I did was to compare the LP and CD transfers of the 1952 commercial recording of the Sixth Symphony which suffered from 78rpm surface noise. The present transfer is a great improvement and has greater clarity, though put it alongside the World Record Club LP transfer (9/60—nla) and you will find that the latter has greater warmth.
Listening to these infectious and spirited performances one realizes why we were all so enthusiastic about Nielsen in the 1950s, for there is a blazing commitment about them that comes across in spite of what one must admit is pretty inferior sound. The Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra was of world-class quality in those days and had a missionary zeal to convince us that Nielson was a great composer. Everyone played with such ardour and fervour. The high points of the set for me were Thomas Jensen's versions of the Espansiva and the Fourth (Inextinguishable), which he never recorded commercially. Launy Grondahl's incandescent version of the latter on HMV (10/52—nla) was unchallenged for more than a decade and its fires still burn brightly when one returns to it, but Jensen is every bit as highly charged. His opening movement is wonderfully concentrated: ''very fast with a sense of urgency rather than haste, and there is tremendous intensity and power'', is what I wrote first time round. Unfortunately the 1952 sound is pretty rough at times.
Jensen's Espansiva is a model for any conductor. So many of them (Bernstein included) labour over its finale, encouraged by reports that Nielsen himself adopted a very broad tempo. This version sounds absolutely right and its breadth is not at the expense of momentum: the listener is swept along as indeed he is by the rest of the symphony. (The identity of the two soloists, not given on the LP, is revealed as Kirsten Hermansen and Erik Sjoberg, who took part in Tuxen's premier recording.) Another great performance is Grondahl's version of The Four Temperaments, made in 1956. The slow movement is deeply felt and there is a splendidly idiomatic finale. Erik Tuxen's reading of the First Symphony was recorded in 1957 and is very fine, though not finer than Jensen's 1952 Decca account (12/52) which, I understand, will be restored soon.'