Carl Nielsen: Symphonies Nos. 4 & 5

Winning a single category award is one thing; winning the overall Recording of the Year against every other classical release submitted that year is another. Fabio Luisi and the Danish National Symphony Orchestra’s account of Nielsen’s Symphonies 4 and 5, released on Deutsche Grammophon in October 2022, did both at the 2023 Gramophone Classical Music Awards, taking the Orchestral Award and the magazine’s top overall prize in the same year, with Gramophone’s own judges writing that “Nielsen has surely never sounded better on record.”

This is the first instalment of a complete Nielsen symphony cycle from Luisi and the orchestra, following roughly six years of live performances of this repertoire across Europe, the United States and Asia before any of it was committed to disc, a long runway of live familiarity that’s unusual for a studio cycle and part of what the awarding judges singled out.

About the two symphonies

Symphony No. 4, subtitled “The Inextinguishable,” is Nielsen’s best-known orchestral work, composed during the First World War and built around a famously dramatic passage for two timpanists playing from opposite sides of the stage, intended by the composer as a musical expression of life’s unquenchable will to persist. Symphony No. 5, completed in 1922, is a starker, two-movement work that includes a passage in which a side-drummer is instructed to play out of rhythm with the rest of the orchestra, deliberately disrupting the ensemble’s coherence, one of the more unusual and unsettling effects in the early 20th-century symphonic repertoire. Pairing the two on one disc gives a listener both of Nielsen’s most dramatically confrontational symphonic statements back to back.

About the orchestra’s own claim to this music

Carl Nielsen is Denmark’s most significant composer, and the Danish National Symphony Orchestra’s relationship to his symphonies carries a weight a visiting ensemble recording the same works wouldn’t have in quite the same way. That the orchestra performed this cycle live, repeatedly, across three continents before recording it, under the same chief conductor throughout, gives the results here an interpretive consistency built up over real stage time rather than assembled fresh in the studio.

About the conductor

Fabio Luisi, chief conductor of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, has built a career spanning both a broad international repertoire and closer, longer-term relationships with specific orchestras and their national composers, this Nielsen cycle sits in the latter category, a sustained multi-year project with one ensemble rather than a one-off guest engagement.

About Nielsen’s six symphonies

Nielsen wrote six symphonies in total across his career, and Symphonies 4 and 5 sit at the more turbulent, confrontational end of that output compared with his earlier, more conventionally structured First and Second, a shift that reflects the disruption of the First World War and its aftermath as much as any purely musical development. Opening a complete cycle with these two rather than starting chronologically from the First Symphony is itself a statement of intent: it puts Luisi and the orchestra’s most dramatically demanding, most immediately arresting material first, ahead of the remaining four symphonies still to come in the cycle.

A note on this page

This review was written fresh by the mmmusic team about a real, current recording, not reproduced from an original mmmusic critic, it’s new coverage rather than part of the site’s recovered 1991–2018 archive. An earlier working note for this page had the label wrong (Orchid Classics rather than the actual Deutsche Grammophon release); this was caught and corrected against the real release before publishing, along with confirming the Recording of the Year award directly.