Carl Nielsen, the principal post-Romantic Danish composer, was born in 1865, the son of a painter and village musician. Childhood experience as an amateur performer led to subsidised study at the Copenhagen Conservatory and a long career during which he developed his own personal style of composition, in particular in a series of important symphonies.

Orchestral Music

Nielsen wrote six symphonies, all of which repay attention. The best known are Symphony No. 2, ‘The Four Temperaments’ and Symphony No. 4, ‘The Inextinguishable’. Symphony No. 5, written after the First World War, represents, in its two movements, the composer’s struggle to develop new and stronger rhythms and more advanced harmony. His concertos for clarinet, for flu...