As their previous disc of the Second and Fifth Symphonies already indicated (12/99), Douglas Bostock and the RLPO have a fine feeling for the Nielsen idiom. Their Espansiva is another energetic, characterful performance, excellently paced and featuring two unmistakably Danish-sounding soloists in the vocalise conclusion to the slow movement – placed at a distance, just as the score requests. Bostock is scrupulous with Nielsen’s accents in this movement. This helps him to register the fact that the woodwind lines become ever more enmeshed and prone to anxiety, while the opening music goes ever deeper into its cocoon of pastoral ecstasy. Nor does he make Michael Schonwandt’s mistake, in his otherwise excellent recent recording, of over-egging the deliberately straightforward, non-conflictual finale.
These and other qualities place the RLPO performance towards the top of the long list of available recordings. What prevents it from being a front-runner is mainly the lack of tonal weight, especially in the strings, which proves a serious constraint on the first and third movements, plus the fact that the engineers still haven’t quite got the measure of the Philharmonic Hall. The impression is of an over-crowded foreground, with resonance artificially damped. Mainly for these reasons Blomstedt’s San Francisco account still comfortably leads the field among modern recordings.
The new disc should nevertheless attract dedicated Nielsen-followers by its cannily chosen fill-ups. For the first time we can hear the alternative conclusion to the slow movement, with clarinet and trombone filling in for soprano and baritone. This was no more than an ersatz solution, suggested by the composer should vocal soloists be unobtainable, but it does sound surprisingly effective when the parts are as poetically played as they are here.
The wondrous lyricism of Helios strikes very much the same tone as this movement. Bostock’s account is fine in the outer sections but a little tame in the central Presto, so that the overall curve of tension and relaxation comes out rather flat. The Paraphrase on ‘Nearer my God to Thee’, commemorating the Titanic disaster in 1912, is an early indication of the toughening of Nielsen’s musical language in the wake of the Espansiva. Only a short-score draft survives, and Knud Ketting’s version is more faithful to the composer than that conducted by Rozhdestvensky, both in its instrumentation and in its inclusion of the hymn itself at the end.
Two of Nielsen’s most attractive early songs, in the composer’s own instrumentations, complete this enterprising and for the most part enjoyable programme.'