Carl Nielsen from Bridge, Classico and Dacapo

Matsuyama, a Juilliard-trained student of Dorothy DeLay and Glenn Dicterow, has gone on to win Grand Prize at the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra competition. She shows her star qualities in this competition performance of the Nielsen Violin Concerto. To my mind, two violinists have made excellent recordings of this work: first Yehudi Menuhin, then Cho-Liang Lin. Matsuyama is good enough to join their company. Her playing is friendly and unaffected, with an honesty that suits Nielsen well, and no apparent weaknesses in technique. The occasion lends this performance excitement and suspense, and listeners who have not responded to this concerto in the past might find themselves feeling differently about it after hearing this CD.

Rued Langgaard was from a generation later than Carl Nielsen's. International recognition of Nielsen's greatness was slow in coming, and accelerated only in the 1960s. Langgaard's day has yet to come, although he has accumulated a bit of a cult following in the last twenty or so years, thanks largely to recordings. The Third Quartet was written in 1924. Langgaard never allied himself with a particular style or fellow composer, and his music, while it sounds modern, doesn't sound like anyone else's. As the booklet notes point out, Langgaard was reviled for being too progressive in his youth (apparently he disliked Nielsen's music greatly) and then ignored in his maturity for being too old-fashioned; contemporary acceptance passed this poor man right by! The Third String Quartet is one of his more frequently encountered works. It is brief (three movements in less than fifteen minutes) and seems to chart a course of spiritual disillusionment, as the "rapacious" first movement is succeeded by a tiny but volatile scherzo, and a Tranquillo movement whose tempo indication is belied by the trashing of a hymn tune (albeit the composer's own.) The young Miró String Quartet plays it with angry concentration.

The engineering, despite the various venues, is uniformly excellent.

This would all be for naught if Bostock and the RLPO weren't so masterful. Bostock is a Boult pupil, and he shows his teacher's concern for the communicative power of the music. It was as if I was hearing these scores for the first time without being separated from them by an invisible wall.

This CD's success is equally due to the RLPO, whose members play Nielsen's music with the commitment of new converts. The brass section is memorably fine, and the engineering also helps to make the most positive impression. The clarinet soloist (Nicholas Cox) also deserves to be mentioned for successfully conquering the frightening challenges that Nielsen sets in the Fifth Symphony.

This is a rewarding and personable CD in every way, and I am looking forward to hearing more Nielsen from Bostock and the RLPO.

Bostock is sensational in the difficult Fifth Symphony; the timing of his recording is 33:11. Schønwandt takes five minutes longer, and his is the slowest recording of this symphony that I've encountered. (I should add that I haven't seen any faster than Bostock's.) Placing the two recordings side by side shows how two radically different approaches to the same work can yield equally valid results.

It is an almost irresistible temptation to play the Fourth Symphony for thrills. Conductors who do so certainly can produce a gripping effect, and one that is not necessarily unfriendly to Nielsen's intentions. At 36 minutes, Schønwandt is well within the norm for this work, but his reading is more subtle than prominent ones conducted by Karajan and Bernstein, for example. The timpani battle in the work's last section is not muted, however, and there's a lack of self-consciousness to this recording that I find appealing.

Dacapo's engineering is very fine, although the volume needs to be turned high to appreciate it. There are excellent annotations by Michael Fjeldsøe.

Brittens Music Eastbourne