Danish orchestra’s case for Nielsen
One of the signature aspects of Herbert Blomstedt’s stint as music director of the San Francisco Symphony was his advocacy for the six strange and arresting symphonies of Carl Nielsen. Passion for the music of this great Danish composer never quite took root here, but in his homeland it’s a reference point.
So it made sense that Nielsen’s music was the most striking aspect of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra’s recent two-night visit to Davies Symphony Hall — the first local appearances by this nearly 100-year-old ensemble — as part of the San Francisco Symphony’s Great Performers Series.
Conductor Fabio Luisi began things on Sunday, April 2, with the “Helios” overture, a gorgeously pictorial evocation of the sunny Greek landscape, and concluded the next evening with Nielsen’s angular, elusive Sixth Symphony. The two performances combine to make a powerful case for both the orchestra itself — a nimble, resourceful ensemble distinguished by sinewy string sections and warm brass playing — and for Nielsen’s music, which remains underappreciated in this country more than 75 years after the composer’s death.
The overture doesn’t call for much persuasion — in a performance this strong, it pretty much sells itself — but the Sixth is a tougher nut for listeners to crack. Its structure is fragmentary and full of feints; there’s a scherzo that sounds like Spike Jones running amok through the woodwinds and percussion, and the concluding set of theme and variations includes a sentimental waltz disrupted by Ivesian dissonances.
Luisi and the orchestra didn’t shy away from the work’s paradoxes, but they brought enough technical rigor and rhetorical conviction to the proceedings to make the symphony’s fun-house logic sound persuasive. It helped that the orchestra members seemed to have Nielsen’s distinctively pointed language in their veins.
Luisi, the Italian conductor who is in his first season as the orchestra’s music director, spurred the ensemble to extravagant shows of passion in other repertoire. Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony and Richard Strauss’ “Don Juan” got full-blooded readings marked by rhythmic ferment and a keen sense of the dramatic.
Joining the orchestra were soprano Deborah Voigt in a stately but expressively apt account of Wagner’s “Wesendonck-Lieder,” and violinist Arabella Steinbacher, who rendered the Beethoven concerto as an utterance of steely grace. The orchestra’s encore both nights was Jacob Gade’s “Tango Jalousie.”