Nielsen - Violin Sonata No. 2, Opus 35

Carl Nielsen - Violin Sonata no.2 opus 35. I. Allegro con tiepidezza II. Molto adagio III. Allegro piacevole. The Danish Duo: Frank Jarlsfelt, piano. Johannes Søe Hansen, violin. Music for violin and piano The sonata for violin and piano - and other pieces in smaller formats: romances, lieder, berceuses etc. - are, along with works for cello and piano, some of the most typical genres in the chamber music of the late nineteenth century. They are particularly characteristic in terms of their popularity in the period. If the instruments mentioned are all combined, we get the classic piano trio, another ensemble that contributed greatly to the musical profile of the fin-de-siècle as both a chamber-music and a salon-music genre. These decades around the turn of the century had a yen not only for the large-scale (in both an inward and outward sense), but also for effects of the more easily accessible kind - the impressive and festive as well as the emotive, indeed the sentimental. As musical venues the 'Palm Court' cafés in some ways played a role that was a match for that of the concert halls. (The Dacapo release Cello Miniatures (8.224092) may perhaps illustrate some of this.) Within this 'broader' Danish musical culture, though, it seems difficult to discern a 'modern breakthrough', anything along the lines of the movement identified by Georg Brandes at the beginning of the 1880s in literature, and also easily traceable in Danish painting after about 1880. It did come, though considerably later; especially in the figure of Carl Nielsen (1865-1931); but even in his music the modern struggles with classicism. It is also at bottom this tendency, due first and foremost to the incredibly strong influence of Niels W. Gade (1817-1890) on Danish music and musical life, that can make it seem that the modern musical breakthrough in Denmark failed to materialize. But perhaps it will become a little clearer that Danish music too had its share in this part of the history of mentalities if we look at the small, piano-related chamber music forms in more detail. In this connection it may be worth noting that a Swedish composer from this time, Wilhelm Peterson-Berger (1867-1942) argued shortly after 1900 for a shift of interest from the classic genre of chamber music, the string quartet, to the violin sonata. His argument was that the latter genre had closer affinities to the popular (in this context understood to include the folkloric, the cultivation of the Nordic folk music style). Thus - once again - we have popular appeal as an element of attraction. This kind of national romanticism - more specifically the later phase of what was generally a rather older aesthetic - must be identified as a 'modern', decidedly urban reflection of the national as authenticity, and thus at the same time as something new, understood as something sense- and mood-stimulating on an antihistoricizing basis. Martin Nyrop's City Hall in Copenhagen is a fine example of the tendency in architecture. All this is really only circumlocutions, attempts to explain and defend a selection of works on this CD which may seem rather incongruous: with two certainly very different but individually weighty sonatas as well as two decided trifles. One fact behind the overall approach attempted here, and more independent of it, is that the three composers represented belong to a larger group traditionally described in Danish musical history as being 'in the shadow of Carl Nielsen', and therefore classified as 'Late Romantics'. To this picture we should add an assessment that sheds a rather different light on the matter: a selection of works like the one offered here may serve to present the composers Hakon Børresen (1876-1954), Louis Glass (1864-1936) and Fini Henriques (1867-1940) as more representative, more typical of the period and - most importantly here - as the kind of composers to whom people would rather listen than to Carl Nielsen. More than most of his earlier...

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Carl Nielsen - Violin Sonata no. 2 opus 35