With Birmingham hosting a month-long celebration of the music of Denmark, Sakari Oramo and the City of Birmingham Symphony made two Danish symphonies (by Langgard and Nielsen) the focus of their programme on Tuesday. Carl Nielsen we know about, but Rued Langgard, who died in 1952, was the loose cannon in 20th-century Danish music. He was only really known outside his native country on the basis of one work, the extraordinary Music of the Spheres, in which he took a shortcut through 50 years of musical history to anticipate some of the procedure of Ligeti and the minimalists.
But Langgard constantly played havoc with all kinds of stylistic norms, and was as likely to write a work that looked back to the early 19th century as he was to produce something ahead of its time. There's a vast output of organ music, songs and chamber music, as well as an opera, Antichrist, and 16 symphonies.
It was the Fourth Symphony, Autumn, that Oramo and the CBSO brought to the UK for the first time. But this is not an unjustly neglected work - at best it's intermittently interesting, and too jumbled and incoherent to make a lasting impression, even in as full-blooded a performance as this. There's a programme of sorts (each section has a seasonal title), but it doesn't help to tease out the often clotted textures and abrupt transitions. The style is late Romantic, with more Wagner and Strauss than Brahms in the mix, but sometimes textures are allowed to pile up in an almost Ivesian way: the proportions are strange, and the thematic integration almost half-hearted. Placing Langgard's Fourth alongside Nielsen's Fifth Symphony in Oramo's fiercely dramatic account was telling. The Fifth is a masterpiece, hard fought and radiant, with a masterly control of structure, while the Langgard is almost amateurish in its intentions.
Each symphony was prefaced by Wagner - the preludes to the first acts of Lohengrin and Tristan und Isolde, followed by a vocal extract. Anne Evans was the glorious soprano soloist, giving the texts the close attention of a lieder singer, and colouring each phrase uniquely. The combination with Oramo's bright-toned readings was piquant.
