Danish composer Leif Kayser, a successor of Nielsen who has just been exhumed from the archives, had an interesting life story. After his first two symphonies (the second appears on a companion to the present release, along with the Symphony No. 3) confirmed him as a young composer to watch, he cut back his musical activities, in the middle of World War II, to travel from Lutheran Denmark to Rome to study for the Catholic priesthood. He subsequently returned to composing, having stayed clear of the rise of the postwar avant ...
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Danish composer Leif Kayser, a successor of Nielsen who has just been exhumed from the archives, had an interesting life story. After his first two symphonies (the second appears on a companion to the present release, along with the Symphony No. 3) confirmed him as a young composer to watch, he cut back his musical activities, in the middle of World War II, to travel from Lutheran Denmark to Rome to study for the Catholic priesthood. He subsequently returned to composing, having stayed clear of the rise of the postwar avant-garde, and he forged a unique style that showed the effects of both his immersion in Catholicism and his arm's length relationship to modernism. The sound of Gregorian chant gives a subtle but intriguing flavor to the thematic material of the Symphony No. 4, which took shape between 1945 and 1963. That work, while falling into the conventional four-movement symphonic form (with the scherzo second), has an unusual shape, with a slow movement that dwarfs the other three. It's well...
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