World Premiere Recording – Exclusively Available in Stereo DSD & DXD from the Edit Master Source at NativeDSD!
We hope that you will enjoy this World Premiere Recording of Carl Nielsen’s own 4 Handed Piano Arrangement of Espansiva. His orchestral works brought brilliantly to life through the musicianship and scholarship of Rikke Sandberg and Kristoffer Hyldig.
When Danish composer Carl Nielsen finished his Third Symphony, he spoke of the first movement as “a gust of energy and life-affirmation blown out into the wide world,” and called the finale of his Third Symphony “a hymn to work and the healthy activity of everyday life,” truly a sense of optimism all-too-rare for us denizens of the 21st century!
So, why a four-hand arrangement of an orchestral score you ask? In the days before mechanical recordings, four hand arrangements were both a delightful social activity and an invaluable means of making large-scale works available to gifted amateurs who might not otherwise have opportunity to hear them in concert as well as promote them to conductors and concert programmers. As pianist Rikke Sandberg and Nielsen scholar Niels Bo Foltmann describe in the booklet notes, the discovery of the manuscript of Nielsen’s OWN arrangement “Sinfonia Espansiva” was itself a tale of luck and diligent librarianship.
Rikke Sandberg, Piano
Kristoffer Hyldig, Piano
Tracklist
Please note that the below previews are loaded as 44.1 kHz / 16 bit.Total time: 00:45:42
Additional information
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| SKU | 8226923 |
| Qualities | DSD 512 fs, DSD 256 fs, DSD 128 fs, DSD 64 fs, DXD 24 Bit, FLAC 192 kHz, FLAC 96 kHz |
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| Release Date | September 6, 2024 |
Press reviews
Fanfare
An important album both for Nielsen and for the piano repertoire. The performances and recording are faultless. The documentation is extensive. A real Wants List candidate.
But the real treasures here are the Symphony No. 3 and the two Saul and David excerpts in their two-piano form. Though Nielsen originally wrote the arrangements for piano four-hands, Sandberg and Hyldig chose to play them on two separate pianos of different brands: a Steinway for the upper register and a Fazioli for the lower because, as Sandberg explained, it “has an incredibly rich and round bass.” Heard in its two-piano form, the Symphony No. 3 is darker, craggier and more “Scandinavian” than as a piece for orchestra, where Nielsen’s creative and often brass-heavy style softens its edges a bit.
More than most composers, Nielsen comes off differently based on who’s playing him – Jascha Horenstein’s and Herbert Blomstedt’s recordings of Symphony No. 5 sound almost like different pieces of music – and it’s nice not only to hear the quite different sound worlds evoked by the orchestral and duo-piano versions of Symphony No. 3 but to hear the piano version as well played and recorded as it is here. Dare we hope that similar four-hands versions of Nielsen’s other symphonies will turn up?
The second question I posed above is easy to answer. Simply, this is superb piano playing. Sandberg and Hyldig think as one; their tempi and expressive choices are absolutely in sync. Listen to the lilt of the waltz in the symphony’s first movement, the clarity of Nielsen’s counterpoint whenever it occurs, or the sonorous build-up of texture at the beginning of the Saul and David Act IV Prelude. On the basis of their performance, I believe that if the “Espansiva” only existed in this two-piano format, it would be regarded as one of the masterpieces of the genre—up there with the Rachmaninoff Suites and Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. The icing on the cake is the superlative sound achieved by Our Recording’s engineers (as usual). Although this album has a short playing time, the musical rewards are so great that timing simply isn’t a factor. Nielsen fans and piano mavens need to own this recording.
World Premier Recordings of Nielsen’s 4 hand piano music, played to perfection. They have a strong, note-perfect ensemble and a common interpretation that allows for the most quiet melodic places as well as big virtuosic climaxes. Excellent recorded piano sound and a substantial, detailed booklet complete this must have release.
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