Vagn Holmboe: Concertos, Chamber Symphonies and Chamber

Danish critics used to complain, somewhere in the middle of the last century, that Vagn Holmboe wrote too much music for anyone to get a proper handle on him. They weren’t wrong, exactly, though the complaint always struck me as a poor excuse for neglect. Sibelius wrote a great deal too, and nobody used that as a reason to ignore the tone poems.

Dacapo’s ongoing traversal is patient, methodical, occasionally maddening in its release schedule. It keeps making the case that Holmboe absorbed Nielsen’s granite clarity and Bartók’s folkloric rigor and produced something that sounds like neither: drier, more patient, built from what he called “metamorphosis” — small cells of material worked and reworked until a whole architecture stands revealed, the way a sculptor might claim to just be removing the marble that isn’t the statue.

The new all-concerto disc lands two premieres and a genuine curiosity: a work Holmboe himself never heard performed. The Concerto for Orchestra — not to be confused with the far more famous Bartók work of the same title, though its ghost hovers over any twentieth-century piece bearing this name — receives here what is believed to be its first recorded performance, decades after it was composed. A piece finally getting its hearing, long after the composer’s death in 1996, played by an orchestra in Sweden rather than Denmark.

The violin concerto and viola concerto, separated by sixty-three years, make the more immediately gripping listening, if only because the contrast tells you something about Holmboe’s consistency. He didn’t have an “early style” and a “late style” in the way we usually mean those terms. No jagged renunciation of youthful lyricism, no hard-won atonal turn. The musical language simply deepens, gets more concentrated, the harmonic thinking more astringent without losing its melodic backbone. Erik Heide brings a lean, unsentimental tone to the violin writing, phrasing with a rhythmic alertness that suggests he’s lived inside Nielsen’s own violin concerto for years — not a bad prerequisite for this repertoire. Lars Anders Tomter, whose advocacy for the viola repertoire goes back decades and whose Bartók and Martinů recordings remain benchmarks, plays the later concerto with a burnished, almost vocal warmth, finding lyric contours in music that could easily read as merely astringent on the page.

Dmitri Slobodeniouk and the Norrköping Symphony don’t put a foot wrong. I confess wishing occasionally for a shade more abandon in the tuttis — the kind of Nordic wildness Neeme Järvi used to find in this repertoire on his old BIS Holmboe recordings, which remain worth tracking down. The playing here is polished, disciplined, idiomatic. It rarely startles.

Which brings me, reluctantly, to the engineering. This is a Super Audio release, and for long stretches it sounds gorgeous — spacious, the string sound nicely rounded in what I take to be a warm hall acoustic. But the Concerto for Orchestra, recorded at the same sessions as the two solo works, sounds oddly capped at the top. The climaxes are robbed of the last decibel of thrust you’d want from a piece that clearly wants to blaze. Strange decision, or strange accident. It does the work a disservice on a disc otherwise engineered with care.

None of which should discourage anyone. Under an hour of music, yes — skimpy next to the two-symphonies-and-an-overture reissues record companies favor now. But rarity and quality here outweigh quantity. Holmboe wrote thirteen numbered symphonies, twenty-one string quartets, concerti galore. This volume keeps insisting, rightly, that he was one of the real originals of postwar European music. Start here if you must start somewhere. Just don’t stop here.