Gramophone Magazine
October 2025
Editor's Choice

BBC Music Magazine
November 2025
Orchestral Choice

Alessandro Carbonare (clarinet), Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Edward Gardner

Nielsen: Helios Overture, Op. 17
Nielsen: Clarinet Concerto Op. 57 (FS129)
Nielsen: Symphony No. 5, Op. 50 (FS97)

Edward Gardners series of Nielsen symphonies with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra continues with this recording of No. 5, complemented with the overture Helios and the Clarinet Concerto, featuring Alessandro Carbonare as soloist. Nielsen composed Helios in 1903 on a trip to Greece, as his wife, Anne Marie, a sculptor, had won a grant to copy sculptures on the Acropolis. Over its ten-twelve-minute duration, the work depicts sunrise, noontime, and then sunset over the Aegean Sea, and is one of the composers most performed works. The Clarinet Concerto dates from 1928 and is cast in one long movement falling into four sections. It is dedicated to Nielsens friend Aage Oxenvad who gave the first performance.

Composed between 1920 and 1922, the Fifth Symphony is unusually laid out in just two movements the only piece by Nielsen to adopt this structure. Unlike his other mature symphonies, the fifth lacks a subtitle, and so could be considered to be more pure music compared to the descriptive nature of the others. Nielsen described the symphony as the division of dark and light, the battle betwe en evil and good and the opposition between Dreams and Deeds. Considered by many as a war symphony, Nielsen insisted that he had not been thinking of World War I whilst he was composing the work, but also commented not one of us is the same as we were before the war.

"There's nothing generalised about Edward Gardner's response to Carl Nielsen's distinctive idiom... listeners will be struck most forcibly by the ebullience, clarity and flow of the music-making." - Gramophone Magazine, October 2025