There is a kind of pleasure that serious music lovers sometimes deny themselves out of sheer snobbery — the pleasure of the short, shapely, unambiguous piece that does exactly what it promises and nothing more. This disc, a carefully assembled anthology of Scandinavian miniatures from the analogue years, makes no apologies. Neither should it.
Øivin Fjeldstad was one of those conductors — and there were more of them in the 1950s than there are now — who understood that small music requires not less care but different care. His Oslo and Vienna forces play Halvorsen’s “Entry of the Boyars” with a kind of coiled energy that the piece rarely receives: the clarinet at the opening doesn’t merely introduce a theme, it struts. The woodwind textures have that slightly forward, close-miked presence that Decca’s engineers favored in the late 1950s, a sonic signature as recognizable as a handwriting sample. Yes, the brass blare occasionally. Period authenticity of the technological kind, one might say.
Halvorsen himself is worth a moment’s pause. He spent the better part of the twentieth century as a one-work composer in the catalogue, “Entry of the Boyars” keeping his name barely alive the way “Donna Diana” kept Reznícek’s. It took Neeme Järvi and Chandos — four volumes, patient, thorough — to reveal that Halvorsen had written a great deal more than one calling card. This recording predates that rehabilitation by decades, which gives it a certain documentary interest: this is what the piece sounded like before it had competition.
The Grieg and Alfvén items sit comfortably together, as they should — Grieg’s “Norwegian Bridal Procession” and Alfvén’s Swedish Rhapsody No. 1, Midsommarvaka, share a quality of open-air pictorialism, music that seems to have absorbed sunlight and stored it. Svendsen’s “Romance” for violin and orchestra — Johan Svendsen, Grieg’s great rival and in some respects his superior as an orchestral craftsman — arrives with something like ballroom grandeur, a reminder that nineteenth-century Scandinavia had its own cosmopolitan culture, connected to Vienna and Paris, not merely gazing inward at fjords.
Nearly twenty-five minutes of Friedrich Kuhlau is the disc’s most unexpected offering. Kuhlau’s Elverhøj — the incidental music he wrote for a Danish nationalist play in 1828, one of the most beloved works in the entire Danish repertoire — appears here in John Frandsen’s 1955 Philips disc with the Danish State Radio Symphony Orchestra, apparently its first appearance on CD. The music draws on Rossini’s high gloss and something of the lighter Beethoven — the Beethoven of the piano bagatelles, perhaps — without quite achieving either model’s voltage. Pleasant, yes. Gripping, not especially. But Kuhlau was a craftsman of genuine accomplishment, a flautist-composer who wrote some of the finest flute music between Quantz and the twentieth century, and Elverhøj deserves to be heard.
Ole Bull — the Norwegian violinist-celebrity who was the Franz Liszt of his generation in terms of public adulation, who bought an island, founded a utopian colony in Pennsylvania, and dazzled Schumann — is represented by a piece of sentimentally romantic orchestral writing that calls to mind, oddly enough, Percy Grainger. Whether Grainger knew Bull’s music is an interesting question. He certainly knew the folk material Bull drew from, and the resemblance may be a matter of common source rather than direct influence.
Barbirolli appears for Grieg’s “Last Spring” — the orchestral version of one of the Lyric Pieces, a transformation that Grieg himself sanctioned but that always carries a slight air of the parlor made public. Barbirolli’s reading pushes harder than you might expect, an urgency that occasionally tips toward impatience. It is not the most refined account imaginable, but it has life in it, which is more than can be said for some of the smoother, more emollient versions this piece has attracted.
The three Lumbye pieces are simply delightful. Hans Christian Lumbye — the “Strauss of the North” his admirers called him, not entirely fancifully — wrote for the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen with the same instinct for populist elegance that Johann Strauss II brought to the Viennese ballroom. The “Britta Polka” has exactly the strutting energy the title implies, and the “Copenhagen Steam Railway Galop” deploys its locomotive sound effects with a grin so broad you can practically see it. This is music that knows what it is.
Fjeldstad’s account of the Intermezzo from Nielsen’s Little Suite feels slightly pressed — the phrasing doesn’t quite breathe — but the “Cockerels Dance” benefits from the same pressure that hurts the Intermezzo. Nielsen even in his most playful early mode has a harmonic restlessness that rewards a certain rhythmic tension.
James Murray has curated this with genuine knowledge and affection, and his notes are thorough. The sound, for its vintage, is remarkably clear — 1958 Decca engineering was very good indeed — though inevitably it has aged in ways that modern ears will notice. This is not a disc for the scholar seeking definitive performances. It is a disc for the curious, the nostalgic, and anyone willing to spend an hour in the company of music that charms without condescending. That is not nothing. On the contrary.
