Inextinguishable.('The Inextinguishable')(Sound recording review)

The great Danish composer Carl Nielsen once imagined that music had a voice, and that it spoke in these terms: "I live tenfold more intensely than any living thing, and die a thousandfold deeper. I love the vast surface of silence; and it is my chief delight to break it." True to that eloquent boast, Nielsen's works often begin with pure musical action, suggestive of bodies in motion and of forces unleashed. The First Symphony, from 1892, starts with a pair of curt chords, bright C major and darker-hued G minor, which land on the ears like a one-two punch. The Third, from two decades later, begins with the note A blasting repeatedly in various registers and accelerating until a takeoff tempo is achieved. The Fourth, subtitled "The Inextinguishable," written during the First World War, is a melee from the first measure; the Fifth, from the early twenties, emerges from silence with an eerily oscillating interval, then builds to an anarchic climax in which a snare drum improvises against the orchestral mass. With these bolt-from-the-blue beginnings, Nielsen was undoubtedly modelling himself on the ultimate symphonic forebear, the Beethoven of the "Eroica" and the Fifth. Nielsen's music seldom resembles Beethoven's directly, but it weighs in with the same brute strength.

Given the blazing individuality of Nielsen's voice, it's puzzling that he has yet to find a firm place in the international repertory. He is ubiquitous in his native Denmark, where he holds the place of National Composer-Hero; he is a mainstay throughout the Nordic countries and, to a lesser extent, in Britain. For American orchestras, however, he remains a tough sell, despite periodic attempts to whip up the same enthusiasm that has long attended his contemporaries Mahler and Sibelius. Leonard Bernstein tried to set off a Nielsen fad at the New York Philharmonic in the nineteen-sixties, but it didn't quite take. Orchestral players, percussionists excepted, tend to groan a little when Nielsen shows up on their music stands; his habit of writing furiously fast figures, and then passing them from one section to another, relay style, can make even an ensemble of virtuosos sound like a mess. Audiences, for their part, often go away from Nielsen performances pleased but a little dazed, not sure what hit them.

Lately, though, Nielsen has been gaining ground, as notable younger conductors join longtime advocates like Herbert Blomstedt and Simon Rattle in preaching his virtues. Paavo Jarvi, the music director of the Cincinnati Symphony, has made a strong recording of the Fifth, pointedly pairing it with Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." Gustavo Dudamel also recently conducted the Fifth at the Gothenburg Symphony. And, earlier this month, Alan Gilbert delivered a miniature manifesto by presenting two Nielsen symphonies back to back--the Second, with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Third, with the orchestra of the Curtis Institute of Music. Gilbert's efforts are of particular interest because the conductor will become the music director of the New York Philharmonic in the fall of 2009. From that historic perch, Gilbert might be able to complete the job that Bernstein left unfinished, and make Nielsen famous in a city that already moves to his helter-skelter tempo.

Nielsen, who was born in 1865, grew up in a poor but happy home on Funen, Denmark's second-largest island. He worked variously as a goose-herder, a cowherd, a wedding musician, and a military bugler before winning a scholarship to the Royal Danish Conservatory, in Copenhagen. His major pieces--which include not only the six symphonies but the operas "Saul and David" and "Maskarade," a beloved Wind Quintet, and concertos for violin, flute, and clarinet--are grounded in ruddy, earthy, insistently singable melodies; more than a few of his songs have entered Danish folk tradition. (When the composer turned sixty, in 1925, a national holiday was declared, and he woke to find a brass band playing outside his window in Copenhagen.)

With savage concentration, Nielsen proceeds to hack apart, reshape, mash together, and rev up his catchy little tunes. In this respect, he resembles Charles Ives, the master of musical collisions, and, more distantly, the neoclassical Stravinsky. He is at his most daring in the Sixth Symphony, which is almost an act of compositional surrealism: naive ...