Thomas Jensen (conductor)
Legacy Volume 21
Janine Andrade (violin), Arne Møller (clarinet)
Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra
Tivoli Symphony Orchestra (Karkoff)
rec. 1942-62
Danacord DACOCD931 [2 CDs: 154]
Volume 21 in the Thomas Jensen series focuses rather more precisely than many previous volumes on broadcasts from 1961-62. The only historical excursion is to a single, previously unreissued Tono of 1942 of Eric Coates’ Knightsbridge.
This allows some reconstructive surgery and one can tell from the dates that the concert in which Janine Andrade played Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto on 8 April 1962 also contained Geirr Tveitt’s Hardanger Suite and the light pieces by Chabrier, Adam, Grainger and Schubert. Also, that Guillaume Landré’s Clarinet Concerto shared the bill of fare on 11 November 1961 with Maurice Karkoff’s Symphony No.3 and the Hindemith Symphonic Metamorphoses. Jensen remained an intelligent programmer to the end, mixing and matching, unafraid to include Light Music sequences or to present recent work of far more robust musical quality.
Andrade recorded the Tchaikovsky commercially (review), with workmanlike but hardly inspiring results. Here with Jensen the results are very much more incisive and alive. For one thing Jensen is a decidedly more alert and stylish accompanist than Hans-Jürgen Walther in Hamburg, and he brings to the fore some telling detail – listen, for example, to the wind playing in the finale. Andrade was never the most personalised of players but she is a committed exponent here.
The romance-saturated Nocturne from Sibelius’ King Christian II Suite comes from a broadcast later in the year. Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber has all the commedia dell’arte elements you’d want to hear as well as some confident playing emulating American brass standards in a work I always tend to associate with Kubelík and the Chicago’s Mercury LP. Landré’s Clarinet Concerto was intended for Benny Goodman. Landré was a Dutchman who’d studied with Pijper and the concerto was in fact premiered in 1958 by the Concertgebouw’s principal, Bram de Wilde. This 1961 performance by Arne Møller, who held a similar position with the Danish Royal Orchestra, makes a persuasive case for the single-movement 18-minute work in its accommodation of glowering and lightly ironic elements. Though the notes downplay the jazzy elements, I thought I detected some light hints of Bernstein’s ‘Prelude, Fugue and Riffs’, which had been first performed in October 1955, three years before the concerto had been composed.
Jørgen Bentzon was an older cousin of the more familiar Niels Viggo and his Variations of 1936 was an effective and distinctive homage to Nielsen broadcast on 19 November 1962. Karkoff’s one-movement Symphony No.3 ‘Sinfonia breve’ was composed slightly later than Landré’s concerto but is even more concise at 14-minutes. It opens with a grim Shostakovich-like Adagio before embracing a wider range of sonorities – notably a solo for the trombone (Nielsen is probably the precedent) – followed by an urgent Allegro before returning in a comfortable arc to the opening sense of unease.
One turns with a bit of relief to the trickster Geirr Tveitt, whose splendid Hardanger Suite No.1 offers a bite-size feast of confectionary – 15 morsels packed with nutritious wit. These vivid, colourful and characterful pieces pack a punch too – they’re not throwaway fluff. The Echo Song vies with the punchy Sad Song about an Empty Brandy Glass for maximal effect but they’re all worth hearing. They also allow one to ease into those Light Music pieces with which the second disc ends – it’s especially good to hear Jensen essay the Adam and to hear the sprucely conducted Coates.
As always from Danacord’s series, this twofer is priced ‘as for one’.
The booklet notes are up to this label’s usual high standard and I see that volume 22 is in preparation so if you want to hear Jensen’s Mozart, Haydn and Corelli, you won’t have long to wait.
Jonathan Woolf
Availability: Danacord
Contents
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
Violin Concerto in D, Op.35 (1878)
Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)
King Christian II Suite, Op.27: I. Nocturne (1898)
Paul Hindemith (1895-1964)
Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber (1943)
Guillaume Landré (1905-1968)
Clarinet Concerto (1957-8)
Jørgen Bentzon (1897-1951)
Variations for Small Orchestra, Op.28 (1936)
Maurice Karkoff (1927-2013)
Symphony No.3 ‘Sinfonia breve’, Op.38 (1958-9)
Geirr Tveitt (1908-1981)
Hardanger Suite No.1, Op.151 (1950/54)
Emmanuel Chabrier (1841-1894)
España (1883)
Adolphe Adam (1803-1856)
La poupée de Nuremberg: overture (1852)
Percy Grainger (1882-1961)
Country Gardens (1918)
Eric Coates (1886-1957)
London Suite; III. Knightsbridge (1933)
Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
Marche Militaire No.1, D.733 (c. 1818)
