Nielsen Symphonies Complete – Colin Davis and the LSO

Some scores announce themselves through the strings, some through the brass, and a rare few through a machine gun of timpani rolls that seem to threaten the whole architecture of tonality itself. Nielsen’s Inextinguishable belongs in that last category, and it takes an orchestra with genuine nerve to let those two thundering timpanists at the close have their say without the music collapsing into noise for its own sake. The London Symphony players don’t blink. They’ve had practice.

Sir Colin Davis came to Nielsen relatively late. Sibelius gets there first, seduces you with those long granite paragraphs, and Nielsen can seem an odd, angular relation by comparison, ill at ease at the family gathering. Davis, though, had decades with the LSO behind him by the time these performances were set down, and something in that long partnership carries the interpretation further than mere calculation could.

The Fourth Symphony wants nerve above all. Written under the shadow of the war Nielsen refused to name directly in his music yet could not entirely exclude from it, the piece stakes its claim in the title alone: life force, indestructible, “the inextinguishable.” Davis takes the opening Allegro at a tempo that feels urgent without tipping into recklessness. Winds articulate cleanly against string tremolandi that never blur into mush, and the great unison string theme, when it finally coheres, arrives less like triumph than like relief. The slow movement breathes. The scherzo has good manners it probably shouldn’t have. And then those timpani, placed antiphonally, snarling at each other across the stage, do their explosive work, and the ending feels earned, hard-won, a survival rather than a victory lap.

The Fifth is the tougher nut, always. No breaks between movements that behave as you expect, no simple narrative arc. Just that extraordinary passage where the snare drummer is instructed to improvise against the orchestra, ad libitum, “as if to obstruct the music at all costs,” Nielsen’s own marking. Davis lets this confrontation play out with real menace; the LSO percussionist sounds like he means it, not merely executing a modernist stunt but genuinely trying to derail the argument. The clarinet solo that eventually restores order — thin, plaintive, almost embarrassed by its own vulnerability — is beautifully turned here. The second movement’s fugal writing has clarity without dryness, propulsion without haste.

So the performances themselves are not in question. What nags is the recorded sound, and I say this with real reluctance, because LSO Live has given us superb things: their Berlioz, their Beethoven cycle, above all Davis’s own late Sibelius, which had presence and air to spare. Here the balance feels older-fashioned than the engineering credits would suggest. Sections are lit differently from each other, brass slightly recessed where you’d want bloom, string tone occasionally compressed in exactly the passages that most need room to expand. It’s not bad sound. It simply isn’t demonstration sound, and Nielsen, a composer obsessed with spatial separation, antiphonal effect, instrumental confrontation as a structural principle, arguably needs more sonic clarity than most.

Where does this leave the collector? Not badly off, but not spoiled for choice either. Blomstedt’s Danish Radio recordings from the ‘90s remain a benchmark for idiomatic warmth. Bernstein’s old New York account of the Fourth still has a ferocity nobody has quite matched, if you can live with 1960s engineering of its own. Davis gives you interpretive intelligence, an orchestra playing at the height of its powers, structural clarity that never feels didactic, and sound that merely does its job rather than dazzles.

Recommended, then, but with the small asterisk experience teaches you to expect from live recordings: buy it for the performances, forgive the engineering, and treasure that snare drum doing its level best to wreck everything Nielsen spent thirty minutes building.