A hundred years ago, as part of the post-war settlement, Southern Jutland (otherwise known as North Schleswig) returned to Denmark after 56 years of Prussian rule. The reunification was celebrated by, among other things, a gala play for which Nielsen was commissioned to compose the score that is here recorded in its entirety for the first time.

By its very nature this is ephemeral music, designed to support a one-off occasion, though it was moderately successful at its first performance in January 1921 and was revived once, in 1935. Certain numbers have enjoyed continuing popularity even to this day. The delectable miniature for flute and harp, ‘The Fog is Lifting’, is quintessential Nielsen in its gentle sense of wonder and has effectively become one of his calling cards, and the songs ‘My girl is a bright as amber’ and ‘There’s a fleet of floating islands’ soon found their way into the national treasury. Near the beginning of the play, Nielsen also reused his marvellous tone poem Saga-Dream, to set the allegorical scene of a country enveloped in fog (which lifts to reveal a lost country and a Mother separated from her son, ie Denmark separated from Southern Jutland).

There may not be any comparably sparking gems in the less familiar music – Nielsen was juggling work at the time with the far more absorbing project of the Fifth Symphony. And among the few surprises, the truncated arrangements of four national anthems (representing belligerents in the Great War) may not actually have been his work at all. But the composer of Maskarade is never far away in spirit or style, and the fund of melody never fails to impress.

Non-Danes will find Dacapo’s synopsis helpful in order to follow the content of the seven scenes. The booklet contains the texts in Danish only, although thankfully an English translation is available on the Dacapo website. In any case it is easy to surrender to the performance itself, which has all the undemonstrative command of the idiom that we would expect from the main orchestra of the composer’s native island, and there are characterful contributions from all the vocal and instrumental soloists. Nielsenites such as myself will lap this up and hope that it may herald further explorations of the composer’s plentiful unrecorded incidental music.