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COPYRIGHT 2008 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
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...
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