The Danish Piano Trio – comprised of Lars Bjørnkjær (violin), Toke Møldrup (cello) and Katrine Gislinge (piano) – is a relatively new ensemble, and this CD serves as their debut recording. And what a wonderful debut it is! Too often, the music of Denmark is overlooked in the realm of nineteenth-century chamber music. Although many know the works of Carl Nielsen, few are aware of the rich repertory that preceded him, and the links this music has to the pan-European Romantic style of the nineteenth century. This recording, released by Denmark’s national record label, DaCapo, offers a persuasive argument for the continued documentation of little-known Danish works.

The CD presents works for piano trio composed by three composers closely associated with the Classical-Romantic and late-Romantic styles, namely Niels W. Gade (1817–1890), Peter Erasmus Lange-Müller (1850–1926) and Rued Langgaard (1893–1952). Listening in chronological order to the works presented on this CD offers a sonic overview of the development of Danish chamber music during the long nineteenth century.

Interest in chamber music for strings came rather late to Denmark. Shortly after the turn of the nineteenth century, the violinist Claus Schall (1757–1835) built what he called the Musikhus (Music House) behind his summer residence in Lyngby, a small village on the outskirts of the Copenhagen. Designed specifically for the performance of chamber music, the Musikhus became a popular meeting place for many of the capital’s finest string players. We know from Gade’s correspondence with friends that he spent many a summer afternoon during his formative years playing chamber works in Schall’s Musikhus, and it was these experiences that fueled his earliest attempts at composing chamber music, among them his unfinished Piano Trio in B-flat major, which is rendered beautifully on this recording by the Danish Piano Trio.

Though never published during his lifetime, the Allegro movement from B-flat Major Trio symbolizes an important stage in the history of Danish chamber music and a crucial first step in Gade’s advancement toward creative maturity. Gade was an avid adherent to the works of Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann, and he was among the first in Denmark to pursue ‘the poetic’ in music through extra-musical programmes. He even went so far as to establish a Copenhagen Davidsbund in 1834 based on the model drafted by Schumann in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik.Footnote ¹ Gade’s Trio in B-flat major is his first known attempt at writing programme music. Based on an outline he notated in his composition diary on 31 July 1839, the trio’s four-movement programme follows a stylized plot concerning the departure and eventual homecoming of an unnamed hero.Footnote ² We know from dates in the score that Gade completed the first movement in ten days. Written in sonata form, the movement begins with a slow introduction, labelled with a quotation: ‘Wir sitzen so traulich beisammen’ from August Kotzebue’s poem ‘Ewiger Wetzel’. The duality of the two lovers is marvellously rendered by Bjørnkjær and Møldrup in the exchange of sweeping melodic lines in the violin and cello. The movement’s second section, marked Allegro con fuoco, opens with a trumpet-like fanfare (a leitmotif for the Hero) that carries the motto, ‘The Hero departs from his sweetheart’, which leads to a ‘struggle with emotions and unrest’. A quiet march theme begins in the piano towards the end of the exposition and is soon joined by impassioned melodic passages in the violin and cello. The evocative performance of these passages by Bjørnkjær and Møldrup perfectly captures the fourth and fifth mottos in Gade’s programme: ‘Persuasion and pleading’ and ‘Steadfast resistance’. As the liner notes to the CD explain, listening to the music with Gade’s narrative programme at hand is ‘interesting’, but not essential. The music stands on its own, and the Danish Piano Trio effectively brings life to a composition that has lingered in the shadows of chamber music repertoire for far too long.

When Gade returned to the genre of the piano trio in February 1862, he had secured his place as one of Denmark’s founding musical fathers. Gade worked on his Trio in F major op. 42 for nearly two years, completing it in December 1863. In this music we hear Gade’s compositional talent at its best, which is brought out all the more clearly by the performance on this recording. Bjørnkjær, Møldrup and Gislinge present what is perhaps best described as a conscious exploration of Gade’s characteristic style, which even at this late date (1863) continues to carry echoes of Schumann in the buoyant Scherzo and of Mendelssohn in the lyrical Andantino.

Gade’s Trio in F major has been recorded multiple times, first in 1917 and more recently by the Parnassus Trio.Footnote ³ Of all the recordings currently available, however, the Danish Piano Trio’s performance is the finest. The performers clearly have a deep understanding of the composition and the milieu in which it was created. Their performance is simply invigorating – a true testament to the ‘fresh, appealing charm’ of Gade’s distinctive style.

The next composer in our chronology is Peter Erasmus Lange-Müller. Lange-Müller was a prolific composer who studied piano from an early age but was largely self-taught as a composer. He studied briefly at the Royal Conservatory (under Gade’s direction since 1867), but was forced to drop out due to health issues. From 1879 until 1883 Lange-Muller served as conductor of Copenhagen’s Koncertforening, an organization he co-founded in 1874 as an alternative to the Musikforeningen, which had been under Gade’s control since 1850. Lange-Müller struggled when writing large orchestral pieces, and he is probably best known for his vocal music, which includes some of the most effective art songs in the Danish repertoire. The Piano Trio in F minor op. 53 is among his most impressive instrumental works.

Lange-Müller had largely withdrawn from Copenhagen’s official musical life by the time he composed this Trio in 1890. He was living in Stockholm at the time, where he had become close friends with a group of local composers, including Tor Aulin, Emil Sjögren and Wilhelm Stenhammer. Eight years would pass before the Piano Trio in F minor was published, and another two before its first public performance. All this is to say that the work was created simply for the joy of composing it. It is a substantial work – over 30 minutes in length – composed thoughtfully and with great passion for close friends and colleagues, all of which comes through in the thrilling performance rendered on this recording.

The final work on this CD, and in our chronology of Danish piano trios, is Rued Langgaard’s Mountain Flowers. Langgaard forged a compositional style all his own at the dawn of the twentieth century. The son of professional musicians – his father was a composer and pedagogue, his mother a pianist – Langgaard had interests that passed through a range of styles, from late Romanticism and Schoenberg-inspired atonality to experimental, absurdist works. At the age of 11 he made his debut as an organist/improviser in Copenhagen to much acclaim. Four years later, he composed Mountain Flowers, which served as the first step on his creative journey as a composer. Written in 1908, the single-movement work reflects Langgaard’s early fascination with Wagner and the programme music of Liszt and Richard Strauss. In fact, shortly after completing Mountain Flowers, Langgaard expanded its orchestration and included it as the second movement of his First Symphony, a work similar in programme to Strauss’s Alpine Symphony, in that it is meant to depict a mountain ascent. For Langgaard, however, the mountains depicted are not the Alps, but rather Kullen (Kullaberg), a mound of stone 185 metres tall with dramatic rock formations and ragged precipices, rising out of the sea in southern Sweden. When Langgaard published the programme for his symphony at the premiere in 1913, he referenced Kullen’s distinctive terrain. In the second movement, listeners encounter ‘the flowers of the mountain trembling faintly as the gentle breeze sweeps ghost-like through the tops of the spruce trees’. This evocative description comes to life in the nuanced performance of Mountain Flowers presented by Bjørnkjær, Møldrup and Gislinge.

Denmark’s rich musical legacy would be served well with more recordings from the Danish Piano Trio.