Nielsen: Music for Wind and Piano | CD review

With the exception of the Wind Quintet, one of the sunniest and most relaxed of Carl Nielsen's mature works, none of the pieces in this collection of his wind music is at all substantial. Apart from the quintet, the longest piece here is the witty and rustic Serenata in Vano, for the strange combination of clarinet, bassoon, cello and double bass, which Nielsen composed in 1914. The rest here are either early - the clarinet-and-piano Fantasy and the Fantasy Pieces for oboe and piano - or occasional, such as the miniatures for flute that Nielsen extracted from incidental music he wrote in 1918 for a patriotic play. All are slight, charming, sometimes faux-naif pieces. The real reason for investigating this disc is the New London Chamber Ensemble's account of the quintet, one of the most important in the wind players' chamber repertoire. It's a warmly affectionate, if slightly neutral performance that doesn't quite bring the music into the sharp focus it really needs. Nielsen was at pains to delineate the character of each player in the original group for which he wrote the quintet, but too little of those different personalities emerges here.