Music and Vinyl: Nielsen

Just over a month ago I posted Carl Nielsen's Clarinet Concerto from this 1966 Chicago recording, and here is the work on the other side - Nielsen's 2nd Symphony "The Four Temperaments".

First performed in 1902, each movement has a subtitle depicting a personality type - choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic, and sanguine. Rovi Staff provided this description of the symphony:

Nielsen's Symphony No. 2, Op. 16 (1901-02) was inspired by a depiction of the four temperaments or "humours" -- long used to describe one's personality and physical characteristics -- on the wall of a village inn on the Danish island of Sjaeland. The composer fashioned a symphony based on the temperaments, cautioning that his treatment of them was not intended to be programmatic; instead, these four states merely provide an outline of the moods in the work. Nielsen described the musical depictions in the symphony's four movements thus: "... [T]he impetuous (Allegro collerico), the indolent (Allegro flemmatico), the melancholy (Andante malincolico) and the cheerful (Allegro sanguino). But the impetuous man can have his milder moments, the melancholy man his impetuous or brighter ones, and the boisterous, cheerful man can become a little contemplative, even quite serious -- but only for a little while. The lazy, indolent man, on the other hand, only emerges from his phlegmatic state with the greatest of difficulty, so this movement is both brief (he can't be bothered) and uniform in its progress."

In addition to displaying the composer's masterful talent for sonic portraiture, the symphony also demonstrates one of Nielsen's highly individual techniques, which he called "progressive tonality": a series of adventurous modulations that bypass the formal key relationships characteristic of most Classical and Romantic symphonies. Nevertheless, the influence of Brahms is clearly in evidence, especially in the third movement. After a few early performance, the symphony was not often heard until the 1960s, when Nielsen's genius began to receive wider recognition.

In addition to the sleeve notes reproduced below, listen to the commentary (below) by Nielsen scholar and composer Robert Simpson which was issued with the Unicorn box set of the complete symphonies - from which I posted Symphony No.4 some years ago.