Nielsen's Flute Concerto

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 926, 10 May 1957, Page 9

Nielsen's Flute Concerto

HE Flute Concerto by the Danish composer Carl Nielsen (1865-1931), to be played by James Hopkinson with the National Orchestra in a studio concert on Thursday, May 9, has more savage elements in it than one usually associates with the flute. Nielsen himself wrote that "the flute cannot belie its true nature. It is at home in Arcadia and prefers pastoral moods. A composer must therefore fit in with its gentle nature if he doesn’t want to be branded as a barbarian." But in this work there are brutal elements that to some extent belie the composer’s statement. It was written late in his career, just after he had finished his bitter Sixth Symphony. Nielsen wrote it for the flautist Gilbert Jespersen, and it contains a kindly joke at the expense of his friend. The work

is in two movements only, and the whole of the first movement is taken up with a restless search by the flute for the right key. To the consternation of the flute, the bass trombone joins in the search. During the movement several melodic resting places are found,

but the key eludes the instruments and the movement ends questioningly. The point of the work is seen near the end of the second movement when the trombone clumsily alights on the right theme-a theme which has been heard in the first movement-but it plays it in the wrong key and it is only by sheer good luck that it manoeuvres itself into the right key of E major and plays the theme. The flute is outraged and. emits pained but graceful phrases. After raucous glissandi from the trombone the movement ends in good spirits. Nielsen’s biographer Robert Simpson has described the work in this way: "The flute concerto is one of the most endearing of all Nielsen’s works, and its humour is of the profoundest and most sympathetic kind. It represents a throwing off of his terrible fit of subjective gloom; although his health never recovered, his music never again showed signs of disintegration, even in the knotty and often angry clarinet concerto. . . It must certainly be one of the most original concertos ever written for the flute."