Danish conductor, violinist and composer, Carl Nielsen, is widely recognised as Denmark’s greatest composer. His String Quartet No. 1 in G minor was one of his earliest compositions, although it was not published until more than ten years later, having gone through some quite extensive revisions following its not wholly successful premiere on 26th March 1889.
Even in this earliest of works we can hear Nielsen’s signature musical style – the rich melodies, harmonic vigour, vibrant orchestration and energetic rhythms - skilfully expanded further in this version by Joseph Swensen. On his orchestration of this wonderful piece Joseph Swensen says:
Four Movements for Orchestra (1888) is the title I've given to my orchestration of Nielsen's ebullient early G minor String Quartet. This gem of a piece is one of the most ingenious and inspired works I know by any young composer and I’ve always wondered if Nielsen ever considered its orchestral textures and colourful timbres to be material for a Symphony rather than a quartet. Its passionate character is, for me, too powerful to be contained by only four string players.
As for my orchestration, my goal was to find the most discrete, elegant and respectful way to highlight the orchestral nature of the work by adding the tone colours of the winds, brass and timpani to the original string music. We can clearly hear hints of Nielsen's later music in this early quartet and, even at the youthful age of 23, he already seems focused on what will be his lifelong preoccupation, the juxtaposition and integration of opposites. In most of Nielsen's major works the bucolic, unchanging fairy-tale world of his harmonious Funish childhood (with all the echoes of brass bands and church hymns), is constantly contrasted with the cosmopolitan, industrial, dissonant, progressive, international modernism of the Copenhagen of his adult years. His aesthetic ideal to integrate and harmonize these and other opposites in his compositions and within himself exemplify for me, an enlightened and inspiring aspiration for a kind of psychological and spiritual ‘wholeness’.
However, one must ultimately admit that over and above any of these considerations, Nielsen's works are primarily an expression of the incorrigible, irrepressible, childlike temperament of the composer himself, a particularly untameable, irreverent, comic and impulsive personality. Nielsen, the ‘prankster’ of a Hans Christian Anderson fairly-tale, unashamedly loved celebrating the child within him!
Programme Note © Amy Campbell