Carl Nielsen A la Carte

No. 386 of the ongoing ITYWLTMT series of audio montages is this week's Friday Blog and Podcast. It can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast386

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Original posts: TalkClassical; Blogger

With this A la Carte poat, we conclude our week-long look on the #FYLP podcast at the symphonies of Carl Nielsen with two of my favourites – the second and fourth, performed here by Herbert Blomstedt but this time in an earlier Nielsen cycle he recorded for EMI with the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra.

Herbert Blomstedt’s first Nielsen Symphony cycle has made the rounds of reissues; all of these performances were surpassed, by and large, by his San Francisco remakes which feature better playing, better sonics, and generally a bolder and livelier guiding hand from the podium. Still, there are things here to enjoy.

The original post added a pair of short works to the Fourth. Today’s share expands by adding the second symphony, nicknames “the four temperaments”. Nielsen himself describes the background to the symphony in a programme note for a performance at the Konsertföreningen (Concert Society) in Stockholm shortly before he died in 1931.

I had the idea for ‘The Four Temperaments’ many years ago at a country inn in Zealand. On the wall of the room where I was drinking a glass of beer with my wife and some friends hung an extremely comical coloured picture, divided into four sections in which ‘the Temperaments’ were represented and furnished with titles: ‘The Choleric’, ‘The Sanguine’, ‘The Melancholic’ and ‘The Phlegmatic’. The Choleric was on horseback. He had a long sword in his hand, which he was wielding fiercely in thin air; his eyes were bulging out of his head, his hair streamed wildly around his face, which was so distorted by rage and diabolical hate that I could not help bursting out laughing. The other three pictures were in the same style, and my friends and I were heartily amused by the naivety of the pictures, their exaggerated expression and their comic earnestness. But how strangely things can sometimes turn out! I, who had laughed aloud and mockingly at these pictures, returned constantly to them in my thoughts, and one fine day I realized that these shoddy pictures still contained a kind of core or idea and – just think! – even a musical undercurrent! Some time later, then, I began to work out the first movement of a symphony, but I had to be careful that it did not fence in the empty air, and I hoped of course that my listeners would not laugh so that the irony of fate would smite my soul.

I think you will (still) love this music too