Riisager Violin Works – Johannes Søe Hansen

Danish music has a way of arriving in Boston about sixty years late, and even then it tends to sneak in the service entrance. Nielsen we know, more or less. Riisager remains a name that sends people scurrying to the reference shelf — a pity, because on the evidence of this generous and beautifully prepared disc, he deserves a place somewhat closer to the table.

Riisager played the violin himself, which explains a great deal. These are not scores conceived at the keyboard and farmed out to a willing fiddler; they lie in the hand, they breathe with the bow, and they know exactly how much rosin dust a phrase can kick up before it turns vulgar. Johannes Søe Hansen plays with a tone that’s lean rather than plush — no wallowing vibrato, no Romantic honey poured over everything indiscriminately — and this turns out to be exactly right for music that keeps one foot in Copenhagen salon manners and the other in the astringent air of interwar Paris.

Start at the beginning, chronologically if not on the track listing. The Romance in C major, composed when Riisager was all of seventeen, wears its Svendsen influence unashamedly — long-breathed, a little sentimental, the harmonic language still safely inside the garden fence. The Minuet a year later lets in a whiff of Kreisler’s salon manner, all powdered charm. But the Aquarelle in E major of 1917 is the real surprise here: barely four minutes long, and yet you can hear a young composer’s ear sharpening in real time, harmonies tilting just slightly off true. Bjørkøe’s piano playing in these early miniatures has exactly the right touch — unobtrusive, pearly, never pushing.

The big piece, and the reason to own this disc, is the Violin Sonata No. 2, op. 5, written in Paris in 1923–24. Riisager had gone there to study with Roussel, and you can hear Paris seeping into the bloodstream — sideways glances toward Stravinsky, a Prokofiev-like tartness in the rhythmic profile, all layered over a harmonic base that never quite abandons its late-Romantic inheritance. The slow movement is the interesting problem child: cool, almost withholding, resistant to easy warmth. Hansen doesn’t try to force expressivity onto it that isn’t written in, which strikes me as the correct — if slightly austere — decision. The outer movements have real drive, tensile and a little dangerous, the kind of piece that should be turning up on recital programs and mostly doesn’t.

Then, a decade later, neoclassicism arrives properly, by way of Leipzig. The Concertino for five violins and piano, op. 28a, is a strange and rather wonderful contraption — six string players scraping away in unison and counterpoint with a solitary piano trying to referee — and it really shouldn’t work as well as it does. The slow movement in particular achieves a textural beauty that took me by surprise: sustained lines passed hand to hand among the violins like something out of a Renaissance consort, with unembarrassed lyricism poking through the neoclassical scaffolding. The outer movements are motoric, propulsive, Stravinsky’s Apollo filtered through Nordic reserve. Credit to the assembled players — Iwan, Vänskä, Lerch Høj, Ellegaard alongside Hansen — for keeping the ensemble crisp without letting it curdle into mere precision-drilling.

The postwar pieces belong to a different world entirely, and to a different muse: Wandy Tworek, the virtuoso for whom Riisager also wrote his very fine Violin Concerto — worth tracking down in Kai Laursen’s album on Danacord, incidentally, if this disc leaves you wanting more. “Bricconata,” the “Prank,” lives up to its title, all wit and glitter, no wasted motion. “Palavas” is pure circus-act bravura, a Paganini-style fingerbuster that exists purely to dazzle, and dazzle it does — though it’s the kind of piece one admires rather than loves. “Sovesang,” the lullaby arrangement, is the disc’s tenderest moment, simply and touchingly laid out, proof that whatever else Riisager was chasing stylistically, he never lost his gift for a plain, singing tune.

The two-violin sonata that closes the program, op. 55b, is the toughest nut — dry, contrapuntally combative, inevitably invoking Prokofiev’s sonata for the same unlikely combination, though Riisager’s is spikier and less inclined to charm you into submission. Iwan and Hansen dig into it with real bite; intonation in unforgiving double-stop passages is impressively clean throughout, not something one can take for granted in repertoire this exposed.

Recording quality is close and dry, which suits this repertoire’s chamber intimacy but occasionally leaves the violin tone sounding a shade thin in fortissimo — a small complaint against real riches. There isn’t much competition for this particular collection, and there ought to be. File this one under discoveries worth making twice.