Nielsen: String Quartets, Vol. 1

Status of copy at Case Memorial Library
Anthony Tommasini wrote in the New York Times: "These are youthful and energetic performances. And the maturity and authority of the playing suggest that national identity matters. These young Danes seem to have genuine insight into the music of their country's best-known composer. Nielsen, who died in 1931 at 66, is generally consigned to those turn-of-the-century composers who resisted the radical upheavals epitomized by Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Actually, in his way Nielsen was a free spirit who protested against what he called the 'Danish smoothing over' in style. He introduced spiky harmony, roaming tonality and unhinged rhythms into his strongly personal and often searching works. Even in the early Neo-Classical Quartet in G minor the music has an obsessive streak, especially in the restless scherzo. The Quartet in F, composed in 1906 and revised in 1919, while also essentially Neo-Classical, abounds with intriguing oddities: passages of aimless yet haunting harmony and outbursts of splattering counterpoint" ("Classical Recordings," 8/5/07).