Nielsen: Canto serioso for Horn and Piano (FS132)

Nielsen composed most of his wind chamber music towards the latter part of his career, when his interests moved from strings to wind instruments. The disc includes the most familiar and widely recorded specimen of Nielsen’s chamber writing, the 1922 Wind Quintet, coupled with lesser known works such as Serenata in Vano, Two Fantasies Op.2 and Canto Serioso. “Both major and minor works are wonderfully played… One can urge immediate acquisition of this disc,” wrote Fanfare. Although, now longer performing publicly, the Athena Ensemble had an excellent career and reputation, “The music is expertly performed with charm, sensitivity and imagination by the Athena Ensemble” said Classic CD (on the Elgar Wind Quintet recording, CHAN 241-33) and this disc is sure to remind listeners of their back catalogue with Chandos.

The central figures of the CD are two colleagues from the Berliner Philharmoniker – first horn Radek Baborák and first clarinet Wenzel Fuchs. On this recording, accompanied by the members of Baborak Ensemble, they present themselves both as phenomenal soloists without technical limits and as experienced chamber players. In a novel dramaturgy, they introduce lesser known and rarely recorded works (Koechlin), alongside compositions performed more frequently.

The first group includes Les Confidences (“Les Confidences d’un Joueur de Clarinette”) by the French composer Charles Koechlin, whose oeuvre is synonymous with film music of the first half of the 20th century. (In the case of Les Confidences, he also wrote the script for the film.)

Martinu’s Quartet, from his Paris period, and the more neo-classicist Serenade are splendid works yet – owing to their non-traditional configuration – to our detriment have only appeared on stages and been recorded sporadically. Nielsen’s pieces, together with the “encore” miniature by Luciano Berio, round off this very pleasant mosaic of encounters between horn and clarinet in 20th-century works.

This is the first complete collection of Carl Nielsen’s masterly chamber works available on CD. Here all the String Quartets, Violin Sonatas and Works for Wind appear in definitive recordings by top young Danish musicians. The piano works are played in unique fashion by Herman D. Koppel, who as a young man rehearsed them all with the composer himself.

This unique collection consists of prizewinning recordings by the Danish String Quartet, which has preserved the authentic playing style since Carl Nielsen’s time. Packaged in a clamshell box.