Poul Rovsing Olsen Orchestral Works – Odense Symphony

Poul Rovsing Olsen spent a career doing several things at once, and doing all of them seriously: composing, performing, writing criticism, and conducting fieldwork in the music of Arabia and India. That last pursuit was not a hobby or an affectation — it reshaped how he heard everything, including his own earlier work. This new disc from the Odense Symphony Orchestra under Bo Holten covers a span of fifteen years and catches the composer in two distinct phases, almost two distinct sensibilities.

The earlier phase is represented by the Variations Symphoniques and the Piano Concerto, both from the early 1950s, when the influence of Olsen’s Paris studies was still fresh. He had gone there in 1948–49, and what he absorbed — twelve-tone thinking, Bartók’s percussive angularity, the particular kind of tonal austerity that postwar European composers favored — surfaces throughout both works. The Variations Symphoniques, his first major orchestral statement, is a tighter piece than the title might suggest. Variation form has a way of fragmenting into episodes, but Olsen keeps the larger architecture in view; the individual variations accumulate rather than merely follow one another, and the cumulative weight by the end is considerable. Austere, yes — but not cold.

The Piano Concerto is something else entirely.

Energy is the right word for it, though energy alone doesn’t account for the wit threading through the outer movements — a dry, slightly sardonic humor that catches you off guard. The piano and orchestra don’t negotiate territory here, they share it, with neither dominating for long. Christina Bjørkøe is the right pianist for this music. She has spent years in this repertoire, and it shows — not in any sense of routine, but in the ease with which she navigates the concerto’s sharp tempo shifts and abrupt changes of character. There’s a moment in the second movement where the music pulls back almost to silence before the piano re-enters alone, and Bjørkøe’s timing there is exact without seeming calculated. That’s harder to bring off than it sounds.

Then fourteen years pass. Au fond de la nuit — “In the depth of the night” — dates from 1968, and the distance from the concerto is not just temporal. The four-movement suite traces an imagined journey through space: launch from earth, a passage by Betelgeuse, a dead star turning on itself, and return. When Olsen wrote it, the topicality was unavoidable — the space race was at its loudest, and composers across Europe and America were finding cosmic metaphors irresistible. But Olsen’s approach is less sensational than that context might suggest. The influence has shifted from Bartók to something closer to Dutilleux — layered, chromatic, attentive to orchestral color in a way the earlier works simply weren’t. The movement depicting the dead star, “L’astre mort,” is the most striking: the music revolves without quite arriving, harmonically suspended, the strings barely audible beneath sustained woodwind lines. It’s genuinely unsettling.

Holten conducts all three works with a builder’s instinct — he understands where each piece needs to arrive and works backward from that knowledge. The Odense Symphony plays with commitment, though the strings occasionally thin out in the Variations Symphoniques where more body would help. Minor complaint.

Recordings of Rovsing Olsen are scarce enough that this disc occupies essentially uncontested territory. That’s a situation worth correcting, and Holten and Bjørkøe have made the case persuasively. The Piano Concerto alone would justify the release. Together, the three works sketch the outline of a composer who deserves to be heard past the borders of Denmark — original, rigorous, and more varied than his relative obscurity would lead anyone to expect.