If you want to start the BIS' series of recordings of the 13 symphonies of the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe, start here. The Symphony No. 1 for chamber orchestra from 1935 is an appealing work of lean, Danish modernism in three light movements. The Symphony No. 3, "Sinfonia rustica," from 1941 is a work based on folk songs built into ferocious symphonic structures. The Symphony No. 10 from 1971 is a work of Holmboe's highly individualistic method of symphonic metamorphosis based on a moto from Walt Whitman's "Eidolon," his ...
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If you want to start the BIS' series of recordings of the 13 symphonies of the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe, start here. The Symphony No. 1 for chamber orchestra from 1935 is an appealing work of lean, Danish modernism in three light movements. The Symphony No. 3, "Sinfonia rustica," from 1941 is a work based on folk songs built into ferocious symphonic structures. The Symphony No. 10 from 1971 is a work of Holmboe's highly individualistic method of symphonic metamorphosis based on a moto from Walt Whitman's "Eidolon," his hymn to the mutability: "All space, all time/The stars, the terrible perturbations of the suns, swelling, collapsing, ending...."This 1993 recording by Welsh conductor Owain Arwel Hughes and the Århus Symphony Orchestra is as bright and brilliant and as superbly performed as any of the recordings in the series. Hughes has not merely slept with the score beneath his pillow; he is deeply immersed in Holmboe's distinctive and idiosyncratic modernism and his interpretations are dramatic,...
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