Nielsen Symphonies by Blomstedt and Danish National Symphony

There are recordings that arrive in your life at exactly the right moment — the ones that don’t merely introduce you to music but change what you think music can do. For a certain generation of listeners, Herbert Blomstedt’s early Nielsen cycle, made with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra between 1973 and 1975 and originally released on EMI, was exactly that. These were the recordings that convinced us Nielsen was not a regional curiosity, not a Scandinavian footnote to Sibelius, but one of the great symphonists of the twentieth century, full stop.

Now Warner Classics has remastered the set in HD 192kHz/24-bit from the original tapes, and the results deserve serious attention.

First, some history worth keeping in mind. Nielsen was born in 1865 on the island of Funen — the son of a house painter and part-time village performer — and he died in 1931, having spent his career in a country that the rest of the musical world could take or leave. The six symphonies span the years from 1892 to 1925, and across that arc Nielsen’s language moves from a kind of post-Brahmsian lyricism toward something genuinely radical: tonally destabilized, rhythmically argumentative, full of what he called the “elemental will to live.” By the time he wrote the Fifth Symphony — that terrifying work with the snare drummer instructed to improvise as if trying to stop the orchestra — Nielsen had arrived somewhere no one else had been.

Blomstedt understood this. He had been appointed the DNSO’s principal director in 1967 — the first conductor in the orchestra’s history, founded in 1925, to hold that title — and by the time these sessions began he had lived with this repertoire long enough that authority and freshness coexist in every bar. What strikes you, returning to these performances after years away, is how unaffected they are. No special pleading, no exaggeration of Nielsen’s modernist credentials, no nostalgic softening of his harder edges. Just the music, delivered with the clarity and rhythmic alertness that Blomstedt has always made his signature.

The Third Symphony — the Sinfonia espansiva — gives you Blomstedt at something near his best. The first movement’s opening is genuinely propulsive without being rushed, the strings digging in with a focused, almost grainy tone that suits the music’s extroversion. The slow movement, with its wordless soprano and baritone soloists floating above a pastoral landscape, achieves something rare: it sounds natural, unforced, like weather rather than theater.

The Fifth is where you hold your breath. Blomstedt does not sentimentalize the famous snare-drum passage; he lets the confrontation be what it is — frightening, unresolved in spirit even when the orchestra finally prevails. The second movement’s fugue builds with genuine cumulative power, and the coda doesn’t so much conclude as exhaust itself into silence. Jascha Horenstein’s old Unicorn-Kanchana disc, which many of us also encountered in those formative years, remains a more viscerally unsettling account — Horenstein seemed to believe the orchestra might actually lose — but Blomstedt’s version is the more structurally coherent of the two, and on repeated hearings that matters.

The Sixth Symphony, the Sinfonia semplice — which is anything but simple, a late work full of irony and estrangement — is where the comparison with Blomstedt’s later Decca cycle becomes most pointed. Those San Francisco recordings, made between 1987 and 1989, have the advantage of digital sound with greater depth and warmth in the lower strings, and in the Sixth especially, that added richness in the acoustic serves the music’s strange, hollowed-out textures. But the Copenhagen performances have something the later ones occasionally lack: a sense that the players are inside the music rather than executing it. The DNSO musicians played this repertoire as a living tradition. You can hear it.

The remastering by Studio Circé is largely successful — the sound is open and detailed, the original analogue warmth largely preserved — though I’d stop short of claiming it surpasses the Decca digital recordings in pure sonic terms. It doesn’t. What it offers is fidelity to a specific moment in rendition history, the sound of a conductor and orchestra in their prime, working in the Danmarks Radio Concert Hall in Copenhagen, making the case for a composer who still needed making a case for.

The set also includes the overtures and concertos — the Violin Concerto and the Flute Concerto especially reward attention — and the sheer range of the program reminds you how much of Nielsen remains underperformed. The Maskarade Overture, which Blomstedt added to his later Decca sessions but did not record here, is absent; that’s a small loss.

But as a document of advocacy, of a conductor bringing a great national music to international attention with intelligence and commitment, this set remains essential. Half a century on, it hasn’t dated. It has only deepened.