The famous Nobel Prizes, awarded since 1900 from the legacy of Alfred Nobel’s will, and perhaps most notable for the Peace Prize, are presented in Stockholm on December 10th each year. To mark the centenary of Nobel’s death (in 1896) Finlandia have issued this memento CD. Since its inception the prize-giving has been accompanied by an orchestral concert where the choice of music has traditionally been extremely conservative. Indeed, the list of selection criteria included in the booklet accompanying this disc is amusingly practical, hoping to alienate nobody, and finally concluding that the programme should consist of “not too demanding music... and preferably well known compositions”. Over the years Stravinsky and Britten, for instance, have been nowhere in sight (although they might have been considered for a musical award had it existed), and nor have any contemporary Scandinavian composers.
Alfven’s Festive Music is apparently a regular choice and understandably so, a jolly, celebratory piece, infectiously presented here, with a polacca rhythm and a good flowing tune in the middle, while Berwald’s elegant Overture to Estrella de Soria is agreeably cultivated, again with pleasing secondary material. It is characterized here with lightness, vigour and grace. Roman’s Drottningholm Music No. 1 is a most agreeable baroque lollipop, while Bernstein’s more recent Overture to Candide is a modern celebration of human optimism, particularly when performed with such rumbustious vigour, and it mirrors the energy of the Overture to Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila. This sparkles similarly by being played energetically but not so fast that the violins are forced to scamper; it is also notable for vivid woodwind detail, and like the Bernstein the swing of its lyrical secondary theme is nicely lilting. Andrew Davis emphasizes the elegiac, valedictory feeling of Barber’s Adagio, rather than its passion, but he makes up for it with plenty of high spirits in Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture, and Sibelius’s “Alla marcia”. I can’t say I thought a great deal of Rosenberg’s contribution, which barely avoids vulgarity, and Nielsen’s “Oriental march”, which ends the concert with an air of solemnity, hardly shows this composer at his most eloquent.
The resonance of Stockholm Concert Hall, though particularly well suited to the opening piece, also makes tuttis sound a bit noisy (though it is kind to the sustained strings at lower dynamic levels). In short this is entertaining enough, but is principally of interest as a memento of a remarkable annual event.'