Holmboe Piano Works – Anker Blyme

Vagn Holmboe wrote his Twenty String Quartets the way other men keep diaries, and for a long time that fact obscured everything else about him: the symphonies, the concertos, and, tucked away almost apologetically, a small shelf of piano music that nobody much talked about. This new Danacord disc, with the veteran Anker Blyme at the keyboard, makes a case for listening again. Not a loud case. Holmboe rarely raises his voice. But a persuasive one.

He was not a pianist’s composer in the way Rachmaninoff or Bartók were pianists’ composers, men who wrote from inside their own fingers. Holmboe came at the keyboard from outside, as a composer working out ideas that would eventually migrate into orchestral or chamber garb. That distance shows. It is not a flaw so much as a character trait, like the reticence of a naturally private man.

The disc opens, chronologically if not on the track listing, into the world of the young Holmboe of the early 1930s, freshly returned, or about to depart, from those folk-song-collecting treks through Romania with Meta Graf, the pianist he married in 1933. You can hear the ethnographer in him already. The Suite of Christmas 1931, dedicated to Graf, has a scrubbed, spring-morning innocence that put me in mind of John Ireland’s smaller piano pieces, except somebody has smudged the picture with charcoal. The tunes are diatonic; the harmonic footing underneath keeps shifting, almost imperceptibly, like ice on a pond you thought was safe to walk on.

The Seven Small Piano Pieces are miniatures in the most literal sense. Some barely a minute, gone before you’ve settled into your chair. Call it a Nordic Mikrokosmos, though Bartók’s model looms less large here than Haydn’s wit and, in the lovely Andante, something almost devotional, almost Bach. Blyme plays these with an unforced simplicity that never curdles into cuteness. That is harder than it sounds. Too many pianists condescend to “easy” music. Blyme does not.

Briosa, still unpublished, like distressingly much of Holmboe’s piano output, is the disc’s odd customer. A “happy sonata,” we are told. Don’t believe it. The first movement clatters and grinds with a malice that suggests an iron witch dancing on a tin roof; the finale is just as unforgiving. Between them sits an Allegretto placido of disarming plainness, raindrops on a window while something unpleasant waits in the garden. The architecture, fast/slow/fast, is Classical. The temperament is not.

Then there is the Romanian Suite, the most purely enjoyable thing here and, I’d argue, the sleeper of the whole program. Cimbalom-glitter in the right hand, hurdy-gurdy drone in the left, the loping asymmetric gait of Balkan dance rhythms throughout. Played blind, you would guess Bartók, or Enescu, before you guessed Holmboe. It is not deep music. It doesn’t want to be. It wants to remember a summer spent walking dirt roads with the woman he loved, notebook in hand, transcribing tunes from fiddlers who couldn’t read a note of what they were playing. That’s a good enough reason for a piece to exist.

The real weight of the disc, better than half its running time, falls on Suono da Bardo: five movements, nearly thirty-five minutes, and a different order of ambition altogether. The title borrows Nielsen’s own oxymoronic trick, sound of the mute, more or less; Mina Miller recorded the Nielsen works that share the phrase, also for Danacord. There’s a kinship worth pondering: two Danish composers reaching for a paradox to describe music that speaks precisely by refusing to shout.

The bardic association pulls Sibelius inevitably into the room. His tone poem The Bard, that bleakest and most inward of his orchestral utterances, is the obvious cousin, especially in the glassy, harp-like figuration Holmboe assigns the right hand. But where Sibelius’s bard still carries a residual warmth, banked embers under ash, Holmboe’s is colder stone. Dissonant, yes, but never incoherent, vinegary rather than sour, to borrow a distinction worth making. Bartók hovers in the harmonic language, inevitably. More surprising are the ghost-resemblances to composers Holmboe surely never heard: Elie Siegmeister’s piano sonatas, Frank Bridge in his late, bruised manner. Coincidence, probably. Convergent evolution among composers thinking hard about the same problem: how to make dissonance mean something rather than merely sound modern.

The five movements accumulate rather than contrast. Holmboe builds by continuous transformation of small motivic cells, a craft he shares with his contemporary and countryman Niels Viggo Bentzon, and with Liszt before either of them. It is not a comfortable listen. It is not meant to be. But the final pages do something I did not expect: they open outward, from the caves and undergrowth of the earlier movements into something that resembles, at last, light. Whether that constitutes resolution or merely exhaustion I leave to the individual listener at eleven at night with the lamps low.

Blyme, who has lived with this repertoire for decades, brings to all of it an unfussy authority: no interpretive overreach, no attempt to make Holmboe sound more fashionable or more tormented than he is.