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World Premiere Recording

We hope that you will enjoy this World Premiere Recording of Carl Nielsen’s own 4 Handed Piano Arrangement of Espansiva. His orchestral works brought brilliantly to life through the musicianship and scholarship of Rikke Sandberg and Kristoffer Hyldig.

When Danish composer Carl Nielsen finished his Third Symphony, he spoke of the first movement as “a gust of energy and life-affirmation blown out into the wide world,” and called the finale of his Third Symphony “a hymn to work and the healthy activity of everyday life,” truly a sense of optimism all-too-rare for us denizens of the 21st century!

So, why a four-hand arrangement of an orchestral score you ask? In the days before mechanical recordings, four hand arrangements were both a delightful social activity and an invaluable means of making large-scale works available to gifted amateurs who might not otherwise have opportunity to hear them in concert as well as promote them to conductors and concert programmers. As pianist Rikke Sandberg and Nielsen scholar Niels Bo Foltmann describe in the booklet notes, the discovery of the manuscript of Nielsen’s OWN arrangement “Sinfonia Espansiva” was itself a tale of luck and diligent librarianship.

Rikke Sandberg, Piano
Kristoffer Hyldig, Piano

Review from Classical Source