Customer Reviews

Nielsen: String Quartets Vol. 1 - Quartet, Op. 14 & Quartet, Op. 44

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Carl Nielsen was, and still is, best known for his six symphonies. Great works that the symphonies are, Nielsen wrote prolifically in almost every genre, his Wind Quintet the best known of his chamber works. However, I highly recommend purchasing both the Nielsen String Quartet CD's

These two great CD's feature the young, up-and-coming Oslo String Quartet. They play wonderfully together, and they have a thorough mastery of their instruments, the string quartet idiom, and, most importantly in this case, the Nielsen String Quartets. They play wonderfully in tune and create music cooperatively very well. The Oslo String Quartet uses a wide range of dynamics in bringing out Nielsen's music. It is a wonder that these works are not better known and more often heard!

If you are familiar with Carl Nielsen's music and style, you should know what to expect: strange, winding, and engaging melodies, rhythmic complexities, optimistic simplicity, sad mourning, and frequent chordal modulations.

These CD's are real winners (and so are Naxos and the members of the Oslo String Quartet) for making such excellent and affordable renditions of these works available to the public. You will pay two or three times this if you look to other CD labels, and you may not get a better quality set of performances, either!! I highly recommend these two CD's of Carl Nielsen's string quartets.

Being a lover of Nielsen's symphonies and other orchestral works, I was a little put off initially at not finding the composer I know in these chamber works. The quartets aren't pieces at the core of the repertoire (and in this country not even at the fringes), but as with any good music new to one, repeated hearings bring out more and more of the idiom of the composer in question. So I've at last found the Nielsen of the symphonies in these quartets. Interestingly, while the Op. 14 (1899) understandably reminds me of Nielsen's first three symphonies, Op. 44 (1906, revised in 1919) reminds me not of the wartime symphonies but of Symphony No. 6, written in the mid 20s. It has the gentle pastoral quality of this work with much of the quiet humor as well. Perhaps it also shares some of these qualities with the lovely, pastoral Symphony No. 3 (1911), though that symphony has as well the energy and elan of the first five symphonies, especially 4 and 5, with their life-asserting finales. Op. 44 is a much less demonstrative work and takes a bit longer to grow on one. In fact, while Nielsen said of the work that it represents his true grasp of string quartet writing, and despite the fact that it is beautifully and graciously written for the forces involved, I prefer the earlier quartet. It has a stirring Allegro con brio first movement that reminds me of the Symphony No. 2's energetic first movement and a surprising scherzo in which the fast music comes in the trio. (Shades of Berwald, who sometimes encapsulates his scherzos within slow movements?) But both works are genuine Nielsen, witty and wonderfully melodic, both with distinguished slow movements of almost religious intensity. The Olso quartet, founded 1991, is made up of members who are busy in various Scandanavian orchestras but who are obviously seasoned chamber players as well and certainly play gorgeously together. Their playing in the Op. 44--where the lines often intertwine, requiring superb ensemble playing--is everything one could ask. They produce a very fresh, young sound in music that will be fresh to most listeners. Naxos's engineering is fine as well. Recommended for Nielsen lovers and for those seeking rewarding new chamber-musical paths to explore.

'Tis a pity that these quartets (Volume 1 and 2, Naxos) of Neilsen are not included in the repertoire of the many quartets that frequent the Bay Area. They are certainly romantic and lyrical and complex of interplay and rhythm as the better known romantic composers. Indeed, while I have seen all of Neilsen's symphonies and his violin concerto performed, I, like many other reviewers, had no knowledge of these quartets until Amazon's recommendation algorithm led me to them. Although the earlier quartets lack the great tension or theme that engages us fully, Op. 44 is rich in mood (e.g., the Adagio con sentimento religioso) and symphonic in sweep. It is mature and well-developed, acknowledged by Neilsen himself, and truly delightful. I personally find Neilsen's first quartets a parade of musical statements, each movement interesting but not satisfying in the whole. Op. 13, with its thematic recapitulation, does attempt to string the units together. The Oslo Quartet (and their sound engineers) give us very worthy albums. Budget priced, these recodings should be included in your classical collection, but if you desire to purchase only one CD, then select this Volume 1.

By historical reasons, the chamber genre experienced at the beginning of the XX Century, a painful aggravation, and among the different expressions, the genre of String Quartets, whose unique heralds were by then Ferrucio Busoni, Max Reger, Arnold Schoenberg, Jean Sibelius and Carl Nielsen. On one hand, the Russian ballets, Mahler's symphonies and the raising Dodecaphonist movement, literally permeated most of musical halls in international stages. The echoes of the musical Impressionism( ravel and Debussy), the appearing of the "Six" (Taileferre, Auric, Honnegger, Milhaud, Satie and Poulenc) and isolated figures of the Neo Romanticism movement (Respighi), were involuntarily factors that somehow eclipsed this appreciated musical expression.

Carl Nielsen gave this genre a vigorous impulse, because understood the enormous importance of its significance. After Beethoven's death, only Schubert, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Schumann and in minor relevance Dvorak, Smetana impressed this genre of refined splendor and creative vigor.

Nevertheless, the deserved reputation of these musical pages, are still far to affiance themselves in the musical taste of the great audiences, although the countless efforts of new chamber ensembles that have proposed themselves to play these works.

Thanks to the actual technological devices, treasures of such magnitude are available in the market, so this is your opportunity to acquire these priceless compositions that accent still more the prestige and world fame of Carl Nielsen.

I've been a fan of Nielsen's work for many years, but have known him mostly through his symphonies, the Flute and Clarinet concertos, and his Woodwind Quintet. Since the composer was a violinist, one suspects his writing for strings to be special, though I've never been convinced by his Violin Concerto. These recordings of his string quartets by the Oslo String Quartet make an excellent case for his skills in this medium. Interestingly, his string quartets are mostly early works. Even the quartet called Op. 44 (1919) was originally written in 1906. All that aside, Nielsen's revision of the F Major Quartet was a good one, and the work has strong parallels to the Wind Quintet, Op. 43: themes suggesting hymn tunes, quirky modal shifts that suggest Shostakovich, and lively rhythms that at times suggest folk dances. If the E-flat Quartet is more Romantic, and a bit less adventurous, it's still charming and tuneful. These works deserve to be played and heard more often: thanks to Naxos and the Oslo Quartet for bringing them to us at an affordable price.

If you are considering buying Nielsen quartets played by the Oslo Quartet, check carefully that what you are ordering is really what you think it is. There are 4 such pieces, and the disc issued as `vol 1' contains, for some inscrutable reason, quartets 3 and 4. Between them they only amount to less than a full hour of music, but this is Naxos and the pricing is collector-friendly, as always. Speaking for myself, I would rather have unused capacity on the disc than some unsuitable filler anyway.

The Oslo String Quartet was formed, I learn, for the Mozart bicentennial year 1991, so the players will still have been young when these performances were committed to disc in 1997. As best I can judge the matter, these artists are easily mature enough to negotiate the various styles needed for these two complex works. Myself, I have always found Nielsen's personal idiom very hard to pin down or characterise. He can be as complete and committed a late romantic as Strauss or Elgar when he wants, but he has an astringent side too, one that he shows in, say, the clarinet concerto or the flute concerto - or in the first movement of the third quartet. The playing has all the `brio' that I believe the composer intended, and following that the andante sostenuto relaxes as it should and achieves proper eloquence. In fact, the spirit of the composer's indications throughout seems to be admirably conveyed through careful adherence to the letter of them.

The fourth quartet is a slightly odd but very intriguing composition. Is there a suggestion of Prokofiev in the first movement, for instance? This is no longer astringent in its idiom, but has a rather stylised dancing-doll feel to its rhythm. Again it is put across with entire naturalness and spontaneity, and again the expression morphs into the prescribed `sentimento religioso' of the slow movement in a way that sounds entirely right to me with those chorale-like sequences. Whether or not Prokofiev had anything to do with the first movement, I am as certain as I can be that the rising scale-phrase that dominates the finale comes from one of the Bach cantatas, if only I could remember precisely which cantata without researching the matter. Another type of sentimento religioso, possibly.

The recorded quality is good without being precisely spectacular, and in any case these two quartets, or at least their all-important first movements, do not call for an unduly lush or resonant kind of sound. The liner note this time is not actually one of the best I have seen recently. It reads almost as if the writer could not think of much to say, with the consequence that he has to fill a couple of pages with not a lot, largely just telling us what we can perfectly well hear for ourselves and partly making a bit of a mystery out of what is not very mysterious, notably about C sharp minor, which is only a closely related key to the quartet's main key of F and rejoices in the name of the submediant. It is quite possible, I suppose, that the writer experienced my own difficulty in characterising Nielsen, and if so I might have preferred him to take a few chances and risk annoying a few people rather than play for safety and say next to nothing as a result.

Be that as it may, this release deserves my usual salute to Naxos for their enterprise and for the combination of quality with value that they so unerringly provide.

It is something of a surprise that the Nielsen quartets aren't better known. They are, quite simply, fantastic works that would deserve any outing they could get. This excellent Naxos release couples the E flat and F quartets from 1899 and 1906 (revised in 1919), respectively - relatively early works, in other words - and is quite simply another stunning Naxos chamber music success. The performances are fresh, lively and spirited, without mannerisms or overstatements, always subservient to the music but with a thorough understanding of the idiom, the arguments and developments and realizing the often complex rhythmic patterns and romantic sensibility of the melodies to perfection. The music itself displays all the Nielsen hallmarks; rich, but very personal melodic material, invigorating rhythms and a masterly and tasteful balance of romantic expressivity and clear argumentative logic. In short, we have the sunny watching-the-blue-sky-from-the-top-of-tree Nielsen style, expertly and inventively realized and rendered with a wonderful combination of clarity of line and panache by the Oslo quartet. The recording is perhaps a little too close, which means that in the loudest passages the playing might sound a little constricted. Still, this is a stunning success, and this issue is emphatically recommended.