Carl Nielsen’s Chamber Music for Violin

courtesy of Naxos of America

About a month ago Naxos released an album presenting the results of a major project to record the complete works for violin solo and violin and piano by Carl Nielsen. The project was realized through the efforts of Danish violinist Hasse Borup with joint support from the National Danish Academy of Music and the Royal Danish Library, as well as Naxos. Borup’s accompanist for this project was the American pianist Andrew Staupe. The “completeness” of the project is based on the catalogue of Nielsen’s works (CNW) compiled by the Royal Danish Library. The track listing provides the CNW numbers for all of the compositions, as well as the opus numbers for the published ones.

The major works on the album are the two published violin sonatas, CNW 63 in A major (Opus 9), composed in 1895, and CNW 64 with no key specification (Opus 35), composed in 1912 and revised in 1919. Both of these are three-movement sonatas with basically fast-slow-fast structures. Those familiar with Nielsen’s orchestral music will probably recognize some familiar chromatic tropes. CNW 63 predates all of the symphonies and concertos and may mark Nielsen’s initial pursuit of this particular style of chromaticism. However, by the time he began work on CNW 64, he had flexed his chromatic muscles, so to speak, on both the CNW 26 second symphony (“The Four Temperaments,” Opus 16) and the CNW 27 third (“Sinfonia espansiva,” Opus 27). Thus, there appears to be an interleaving of inventiveness between the orchestral works and those for violin (which was an instrument that Nielsen had played since his childhood).

The other major work is the CNW 46 (Opus 48) set of eight variations on a very short (a little over a minute) theme, which is preceded by a prelude, which is the longest section of the entire composition. According to the booklet notes by Niels Krabbe, this piece, composed for solo violin, was inspired by the Chaconne movement that concludes Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1004 solo violin partita in D minor. The inspiration clearly involved structure, since there are few, if any, traces of Bach in the thematic and embellishing content. Nevertheless, like the Bach source, the piece is definitely a reflection on the rhetorical impact of brief “source material.”

The album also includes three of Nielsen’s earliest compositions, all of which were composed when Nielsen became an army musician at the age of fourteen in 1881. These include two Romances (CNW 60 in G major and CNW 61 in D major) and a three-movement violin sonata (CNW 62 in G major). These date from a time when he became more familiar with the chamber music of Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; and Krabbe’s notes include a quotation associating CNW 62 with “a scent of Mozartian youth.” Nevertheless, it is clear that Nielsen’s skill’s had advanced considerably by the time his music was being published. Thus, the mature violin sonatas and the CNW 46 variations provide the “meat and potatoes” of this album and will probably leave the strongest impressions on the attentive listener.