Carl Nielsen Humoreske-bagateller

Humoreske-bagateller, Op. 11
by danish composer Carl Nielsen (1865-1931)
(first performed on 3 September 1898)
1. Goddag! Goddag! 'Hello! Hello!' 0:05
2. Snurretoppen 'The Spinning Top' 0:53
3. En lille langsom Vals 'A Little Slow Waltz' 1:57
4. Sprællemanden 'The Jumping Jack' 3:42
5. Dukke-Marsch 'Puppet March' 4:25
6. Spilleværket 'The Musical Clock' 5:45
‘The piano music of Carl Nielsen is notable not only for its striking emotional power and radicalism but also for its transparency-for the writing is always unmistakably Nielsen … the album as a whole is a treasure-chest, here transscribed for the organ by Anne Kirstine Mathiesen.
She is playing at the very nice danish P. Bruhn & Son organ from 1995, located in Akureyri Church, Northern Iceland.
The 1890s were the period of Nielsen’s first great compositional breakthrough, the time when he established himself as the leading modernist voice in contemporary Danish music, and, for many critics, as an avant-gardiste whose larger works were frequently a ‘bone of contention’. However, his third piano composition from the 1890s, the Humoresque-Bagatelles Op. 11, belongs to the first category of shorter pieces or character works. Though the Bagatelles were premiered on 3 September 1898, little is known about their compositional genesis. One newspaper compared them with Schumann’s Kinderszenen, and argued that they were unsuitable material for the concert hall. Retrospectively, however, a more useful comparison might be with the shorter twentieth-century piano works of Bartók, Prokofiev or Debussy-pieces such as Debussy’s suite Children’s Corner, designed to capture the imagination of younger players and listeners alike. The first piece, ‘Goddag! Goddag!’, is a playful Allegretto whose opening motif echoes the Danish for ‘Hello! Hello!’. Here, and in the following movement, ‘The Spinning Top’ (‘Snurretoppen’), the diatonic innocence of the opening bars almost entirely conceals the more modernist chromaticism of the central section. The third number is a slow waltz that constantly threatens to drift lazily into harmonically uncharted waters, despite its circularity, while the fourth is as dynamically and harmonically unpredictable as its title, ‘The Jumping Jack’ (‘Sprællemanden’), suggests. The two final movements inhabit a stylized world of eighteenth-century classicism that looks forward, in many ways, to Nielsen’s great comic opera, Maskarade (‘Masquerades’). The ‘Puppet March’ (‘Dukke-Marsch’) is like a Haydn Allegro in miniature, whereas the repetitive figuration of the closing movement, ‘The Musical Clock’ (‘Spilleværket’) seems more suggestive of Mozart, a composer with whom Nielsen of course felt an especially close affinity.