GRAMOPHONE Review: NIELSEN Flute Concerto, Symphony No. 3, Pan & Syrinx – Bergen Philharmonic/Gardner

A near perfect combo of works spanning the length and breadth of Carl Nielsen’s life’s work. The tone poem Pan and Syrinx should rightly come between the two big works but it makes for an impressionable curtain raiser in this dramatic and atmospheric performance from Edward Gardner and his marvellous Bergen Philharmonic. The sound of Bergen’s Grieg Hall adds to the impression of a piece punching above its weight. There is huge range between the ethereal, the playful, and the anarchically dramatic. In so many ways it foreshadows the Sixth Symphony.

The Flute Concerto is a clever and imaginative piece maximising the potential of the flute as something more than folksily poetic and songful. Those elements are much in abundance, of course, and beautifully addressed by the soloist Adam Walker. But Nielsen lends muscle to its musical vocabulary pitting it against unequal antagonists like the solo trombone and timpani. There’s a skittish cadenza and much fragrant embellishment but you come out at the other end with a new respect for the strength of character that the instrument can convey.

Any new recording of the Third Symphony now has to contend with the bar set impossibly high by Fabio Luisi and his much-lauded (by yours truly) Danish cycle. Gardner’s Third has a great deal going for it and you might say that his objectivity gives the piece free rein to sing its pantheistic hymn to the great outdoors. At least that’s my overriding take on it. Gardner takes a breezy tempo in the first movement and the carousel-like waltz certainly has a spring in its step. I think he might have played more on the teasing charm of its first appearance and one can certainly (a la Bernstein) push the joyous (dare I say) vulgarity of the rip-roaring climax with its descanting horns. The sheer relish of Bernstein and Luisi in passages like this is not evident here despite playing of great verve and character.

The slow movement’s becalmed landscape of the soul finds the Bergen strings digging deep at the heart of the movement while the added colour of wordless human voices (Lina Johnson and Ynge Soeberg) – lontano – always suggests (and does so here) the free spirit of figures in a very distinct landscape.

Then comes the purposeful stroll – sauntering and brisk – of the novel scherzo and the self-evident pride (that joyous big tune) and muscularity of the finale to which Gardner lends an almost Brahmsian breadth right through to those jubilantly trilling horns at the close – aided and abetted again by the impressive collusion of orchestra and hall. It sounds very fine indeed.

So if the programme appeals – and these works do sit so well together – then there is much to enjoy. But Luisi brings to the work a swing and sweep and abandon that Gardner’s less subjective way cannot match.