Happy 150th, Carl Nielsen!

This year marks the 150th birth anniversaries of two giants of Scandinavian music - Jean Sibelius and Carl Nielsen. Sibelius' anniversary won't be for another six months, but Nielsen's is this Tuesday, June 9, and so I present two early recordings of his music - one of them, as far as I can determine, the very first recording of a large-scale work by Nielsen, a youthful violin sonata as played by his son-in-law Emil Telmányi:

Nielsen: Violin Sonata No. 1 in A Major, Op. 9
Emil Telmányi, violin, and Christian Christiansen, piano
Recorded October 13, 1935
HMV DB 2732 through DB 2734, three 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 59.79 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 35.36 MB)

The other offering is a mature piano work in a recording from late in the 78-rpm era:

Nielsen: Theme and Variations, Op. 40
Arne Skjold Rasmussen, piano
Recorded January 17, 1952
Tono A-177 and A-178, two 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC file, 33.85 MB)
Link (MP3 file, 24.70 MB)

Apropos of Sibelius and Nielsen, the two appear to have been friends. And the Finn admired the Dane's music greatly; the story goes that Sibelius, perhaps embarrassed by the obvious disparity in their worldly success, generously told or wrote to Nielsen (sources seem to differ which), "I don't even reach as high as your ankles!"

Nielsen: Violin Concerto (Telmányi)

Carl Nielsen, 1910

Most people, if they remember the name of the Hungarian-born violinist Emil Telmányi (1892-1988) at all, remember it as belonging to the inventor of the spurious Bach bow (or Vega bow), designed to be able to play on, and sustain, all four strings of the violin simultaneously, for use in the unaccompanied Bach violin works.  But Telmányi was also the first internationally famous exponent of the music of Carl Nielsen (whose daughter, Anne Marie, he married in 1918), and made this first recording of Nielsen's Violin Concerto, for me one of the most delightful of all twentieth-century violin concertos, in 1947:

Nielsen: Concerto for violin and orchestra, Op. 33 and
Mozart: Serenade No. 7 in D, K. 250 ("Haffner") - Menuetto
Emil Telmányi with the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Copenhagen,
conducted by Egisto Tango
Recorded June 3-7, 1947
Tono X-25081 through X-25085, five 78-rpm records
Link (FLAC files, 99.4 MB)
Link (MP3 files, 42.37 MB)