The classical music world always seems to be celebrating the bicentennial of this or the sesquicentennial of that: birthdays, death-days, first performances. It can all be a little much. But one of the perks of this calenderic obsession is the chance to discover a work or composer that doesn’t exist in the oft-played pantheon of Great Works.
Such a piece is on the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra’s roster this weekend: Carl Nielsen’s Symphony No. 5. To put it in slightly less-than-grandiloquent terms—it’s a humdinger.
Nielsen was born in Denmark 1865, just across the Baltic from Jean Sibelius, who was born in the same year (the MSO plays a compare-and-contrast Sibelius symphony in a few weeks). But while Sibelius is known for folk-song driven evocations of his Finnish homeland, Nielsen was more of a modernist crank. There are some lovely lines here, some of them might remind you of the open airiness of Aaron Copland, or even the blues-inflected writing of Leonard Bernstein (whose 1962 recording gave Nielsen’s Fifth its first wide international exposure). But there is also furious experimentation—restless shape-shifting between key signatures, wild dynamic contrasts, and a love of angular melody lines (the theme for the final fugue owes a lot to Herr Schoenberg). Nielsen was cagey when asked if his 1922 symphony was meant to evoke the Great War, but it’s hard not to hear it in his love of booming timpani and rat-a-tat snare drum, and his inclination to whip the large ensemble into a cacophonous frenzy. In the climax of the first movement, in fact, the snare drum goes rogue, pounding away in a different time signature than the rest of the orchestra.
Edo de Waart made a terrific case for this curious symphony that seems to get no respect. He drew true majesty from the stirring chorales, tender lyricism from the strings, but was not afraid to lead his charges into the necessary pandemonium Nielsen thrives on. Please, don’t make us wait for Nielsen’s bicentennial to hear it again.
De Waart has also made a case for violinist Augustin Hadelich, with whom he has performed several times in recent years, including a last-minute “understudy” call with the Los Angeles Philharmonic last year (filling in for an ill Christian Tetzlaff). As they did in Los Angeles, Hadelich and de Waart collaborated on Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, and it was a mostly stellar performance. I can’t say I was convinced by de Waart’s seemingly ponderous tempo in the first movement, though it did allow Hadelich to wax lyrical through Beethoven’s gorgeous phrases. And while the violinist displayed his famous delicacy and sweetness of tone, I longed for a little more muscularity when it was called for (in Beethoven, give me Anne-Sophie Mutter over Itzhak Perlman any day).
Hadelich played Fritz Kriesler’s double-stop mad cadenza with fire and brilliance, and the piece came together in a satisfying whole. Hadelich drew a powerful ovation, and thanked the crowd with an exquisitely played Paganini Caprice.
The program will be repeated again on Saturday night.
