Nielsen: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 3
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The new benchmark’ and ‘set to become the reference recordings’ – these are but two of the verdicts on the new BIS Carl Nielsen cycle from Sakari Oramo and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, based on the team’s performances of the Fourth and Fifth symphonies, also recently released on BIS. For the present installment, Sakari Oramo has chosen the composer’s first attempt in the genre, completed in 1892: a work by a composer still in his mid-twenties. Thoroughly classical in its proportions, the Symphony No.1 owes much to Schumann, Berlioz, Grieg and Johan Svendsen, who conducted the work’s première. Nielsen’s ‘definitive’ breakthrough as a symphonist, however, only came some 20 years later, with the première of Symphony No.3, later subtitled ‘Sinfonia espansiva’, in whose second movement, Nielsen unusually adds vocalises for solo soprano and baritone.