A very interesting interview with Rikke Sandberg in Fanfare
August 12, 2024
Colin Clarke
Interview with Rikke Sandberg Colin Clarke: This is a delightful disc and also an important one, as I feel it puts piano arrangements on the map—these performances can stand alone in their integrity and musicality, and the arrangements are fabulous! Rikke Sandberg: Thank you very much Colin, it is wonderful to read that you welcome this disc with the same approach and enthusiasm as the repertoire has been discovered and recorded with! How did it come about? Kristoffer and I have of course known each other for years in the Danish classical musical community, and we have played together several times, mainly orchestral repertoire, Carmina Burana, Catulli Carmina, Les Noces, not to mention repertoire by Respighi, Saint Saëns and many more, where more than one keyboard player is needed. It has always been very easy and joyful to play with Kristoffer. When I asked him about playing Nielsen’s Third Symphony with me for some concerts, he was extremely enthusiastic and said that he always had wanted to play this piece. After hanging up the phone I was a bit puzzled, because I had only known of its existence for a few years, so how could he always had dreamed of this? The answer was funny: easy as it is for Kristoffer to be a musician, he has played the trombone as well when he was younger, and as a trombone player he had had the dream of playing Carl Nielsen’s Third symphony. Finally, his dream came true!
Espansiva: Rikke Sandberg discusses the music of Carl Nielsen. An interview by Colin Clarke
This is a disc that could well change a lot of minds about the value of recording piano reductions of symphonic works. Long thought of as a functional exercise, arrangements can, in the right hands, have a life of their own. Those heard here have a vibrancy that is rarely encountered. It was a pleasure to meet pianist Rikke Sandberg, who performs on the disc along with Kristoffer Hyldig
Before we get to the music itself, can you tell me about your musical partnership with. Kristoffer Hyldig?
The story of the discovery of these arrangements is a lovely one—I know it’s in the booklet notes, but could you recount in your own words?
The booklet notes are mine as well, but yes, I had an opportunity to participate with a former duo partner in a big classical music festival at the Elbphilharmonie, there was only one obstacle, program-wise, we needed to play some 4 hands Carl Nielsen, since he was the composer of the year and had to be included in all concerts. Nielsen is so famous and loved in Denmark that his face is on one of our money bills, so you can imagine the disappointment, because surely, I knew there was no such thing as a four-hand or two-piano piece by Carl Nielsen. Only arrangements of his works by other composers. I was convinced that everything Nielsen ever composed was discovered, played and recorded, not to mention published as sheet music. I became wiser. I Googled, and Googled, a little desperate, as when you are hungry, have nothing in your refrigerator and nevertheless opens it again and again to check… and finally, by putting the words together in new orders, something showed up. A small note about Nielsen’s Third Symphony as a four-hand piano arrangement by the composer himself, only performed a few times in private settings by Nielsen and his very good friend, pianist and duo partner, Henrik Knudsen.
I contacted some different Carl Nielsen societies, but no-one knew about this. However, when writing to the Royal Library they of course knew. The arrangement was there, in manuscript.
The funny thing is, now, when reading the collection of letters to and from Carl Nielsen it is there, obviously, described many times by both Nielsen and conductors who had an interest in the symphony, it just hadn’t happened that any other pianist with any interest in this had come across it and had wanted to use it. Count me lucky!
Generally, what do you feel are the challenges of playing piano reductions of orchestral/operatic works?
There are several challenges, and the first and most obvious is, at least for my ears, that 4 hands piano reductions sound enormously heavy and overloaded when you play it at first. (this is in general for all symphonies/orchestra works for four-hand piano). There are all the instruments in a symphony orchestra, suddenly in one instrument, so you have to sought out the voices, find the balance, discuss which voices you want to stick out and come through, since the piano sound is “the same” compared to different instruments, it needs another kind of attention and work. Next thing for us, in the Nielsen Symphony, was, that some voices that we found important was actually missing here and there, we will never find out if they were left out because it was already fairly difficult to play as it was, or if Nielsen didn’t find these voices important enough to be there. Or maybe, and probably, he never intended this for anything else than a way to promote his symphony to conductors and therefor did not add everything.
My friend and colleague, Per Salo, pianist in the Danish National Orchestra and editor of a lot of Carl Nielsen piano reductions, took the manuscript under his care and copied it into the computer program Sibelius with help from the orchestra score. We have talked a lot about different problems and questions and will talk more, since the music will be published at some point now. It is an interesting work, and it’s also interesting to do the phrasing and timing and make it a work for piano 4 hands and not “only” an arrangement. There is a bit more time and space to explore dynamics, timing, agogics and phrasing for 2 pianists in a rehearsal room, than there is for a full orchestra with limited rehearsal time. The opportunities are just very different as well as the final result. In every aspect.
On a technical level, pedaling is a vital component here; and clearly expertly managed in this performance (as the textures thicken coming up to four minutes into the symphony, everything miraculously remains clear).
The fullness of sound you achieve is wonderful married to that clarity—it all comes into full force at climaxes, of course. To be clear: for the Symphony, you use a Steinway for Primo and a Fazioli for secondo? What was the reasoning behind that?
Well thank you! We used two pianos for the reason of clarity, pedaling and sound, not to mention the fact that its just a little—actually very—uncomfortable to play side-by-side for a long time, the position of the hands and struggling for space and crossing over each other is great fun, but also a little exhausting. The Steinway is a wonderful instrument that’s based in the Queens Hall in the Royal Library. We needed to find an instrument to match this, and of course we started by contacting the Steinway dealer in Scandinavia, Juhl Sørensen. But we were so unfortunate that they had sold every single of their grand Steinway pianos and the new ones they ordered wouldn't be there in time for the recording. Alternatively, we should postpone the recording, but it’s such a puzzle to find periods where both Kristoffer and I are available, the Queen’s Hall is available, and the amazing producer, Preben Iwan, is available. So, we made a virtue out of necessity and lent an absolutely wonderful grand Fazioli. This instrument has such an incredible bass, round but still clear and very forceful, and as the secondo player in the symphony, with some quite demanding bass-parts I often have been struggling to come through with, I was very happy about this decision. The pianos match each other very well.
Can the crisp staccato in the treble be equaled by the bass response (also staccato) by using the two pianos then?
It will of course never sound the same, due to the thickness of the bass strings, this is regardless of the piano brand, as well as the bass section in an orchestra sound very different from the violins. In my opinion this is more a question of quality of sound, and I do love the round sound a Fazioli can produce, yet with an extremely powerful volume that supports the roundness without hardening the sound.
Staying with the symphony, one of the most difficult aspects of transcriptions to bring off is tremolo – they can so easily sound melodramatic! How did you approach these? (I'm specifically thinking about seven minutes into the first movement, but the question is a general one).
It is a good question and to be honest not something I have specifically thought about, of course you want to avoid the balalaika sound of a tremolo, but in general I think the tremolo should follow the character and the volume of the actual themes and melodies above or below and not be played too percussively, but more as a blanket of sound, if this makes sense?
It does! Of course, when it comes to the second movement (Andante pastorale) it is difficult to recreate that string-based feeling of crawling mystery; Nielsen’s (and your’ s) alternative is a rather more neutral line in octaves. This movement also includes a human voice of course in the original score. How does Nielsen reflect that novel timbre (the voice is wordless, so another ‘instrument’ in a sense) in his arrangement?
Carl Nielsen actually left out this voice part in the arrangement, and we decided to do the same. It is of course missing, but I am not missing it when playing the music. Nielsen was occupied by these voices, however, it didn’t seem like he cared too much about who the soloists would be and to my knowledge he never mentioned the performances of the “soloists” after performances of his symphony. The voices are very beautiful, and I have actually several times been called in to an orchestra to practice with a soprano who underestimated the difficulty of singing the part and needed some more instruction after the first orchestral rehearsal. We could have brought in two singers for this production, and it could have been fun and also great, but we decided to leave it out and keep this a clean piano recording, since the voices are not written into the arrangement and they have not been included whenever Nielsen performed the work on piano himself, as far as I have read and understood. This is an option for another recording some day in the future
A lot of discussion about transcriptions/arrangements like this will be of give and take, but often with a reference to the original. To my ears, the piano version of the third movement is pretty much as good as the full orchestral score: it just works so beautifully on piano (particularly with that clarion clarity of the treble and of course of the articulation of the pianist performing!). I also love your careful pedaling in this movement – the crisp bass around the two-minute mark leading to that wonderful passage of counterpoint.
What is it about Nielsen’s writing that works so well on a piano?
I think Nelsen is a wonderful composer for piano music, I completely adore his piano music and its funny, since he was not a pianist himself. He could of course play some piano, it’s been said that it was nothing special, but however, his piano music is really something. I am also puzzled why he decided to make this arrangement himself, he was very happy about Henrik Knudsen’s arrangements of the two previous symphonies, but this Third Symphony was his baby, and he had very high hopes for it. Maybe that’s why he took it under his own care. He has a talent for melodies, and this is also what you see in this arrangement that some small instrumental sounds, answers, rhythms, has been left out, for the sake of bringing out the melody. In my opinion he does not use the piano as a percussive instrument, but as a harmonic and melodic instrument. Sound, melody and atmosphere are the headlines as I see it and hear it, and I would suggest that this is one of the reasons it works so well and sounds very well. Besides from his symphonies, concertos, piano works and string quartets, he composed a lot of melodies for lyrics, a lot of songs. He is the sound of Danish childhood, since many of his songs are some, you sing to your child at bedtime, in school, when learning to read and sing and so on. Not every Danish youth knows Carl Nielsen, but yet they know some of his music, they just don’t know that they do. The sound of Nielsen is incorporated in the Danish population, and vice versa, Carl Nielsen’s sound is a very Danish sound and tone, capturing the essence of Denmark and Danish people.
The finale opens in the grandest of fashions, truly magisterial yet lyrical, too. The piano version is inevitably lighter, and you make virtue out of necessity here by giving it an air of freshness and optimism. What are the challenges of this movement? To me, it is bringing a sense of truly symphonic conclusion .
I agree. This is a very symphonic tableau, as some parts of the second movement, where the strings are interrupting the orchestra with a bath of sound, the fourth movement opens with an amazing long melodic line played and supported by all the strings, and this crescendo and fullness of tone that you can create on a string instrument, is not an option on piano, since the tone will only start to die, from the moment the hammer has touched the string. We cannot maintain or add volume to what has already been played. This has been quite a thing for us, talking and trying what would work. I believe we have doubled some of the melody to create a fuller sound, and because we cannot produce crescendo in a single note, as the strings and winds can, we had to work more with tempo and direction. Trying to give it something else than sound, so it could work on piano. But you see this also in some of Carl Nielsen’s piano pieces, long lines of only one voice, one note at the time. So, even though we couldn’t copy the string sound, we could still sound like Nielsen. This was an “obstacle” for us but like there are difficulties, there are also some things that’s actually easier to work with in a piano arrangement,- like the large section in the fourth movement where the basses are on hard work with virtuoso passages, sometimes they almost drown in the orchestra tutti sound, but on piano you can make the bass shine and sound of more. There will be pros and cons when playing an arrangement and it has been quite a journey, with many concerts and private recordings to find out what we actually could do and couldn’t do with this fantastic work, so it would sound like a piece in its own and not just a copy of an orchestra. So far, the general reaction from audiences has been exactly that, a joy of hearing this work with a new set of ears, completely different but yet the same and still its very own. And you can imagine that the Danish classical audience is very familiar with the symphony!
I was delighted to see two excerpts from Saul & David as the disc ‘opener’: the Prelude to the Fourth Act and Battle Music with Curtain Down. Can you describe how you came across these arrangements in the Royal Library?
This was Kristoffer’s idea, let’s go to the library again! With small hopes, we went. The librarians love it when questions like this show up, and they helped us find these two small movements. They are again described briefly in” Carl Nielsen’s Letters” just a note to Henrik Knudsen that he should not arrange these two movements, Nielsen wanted to do it himself. We have in the Battle-music added some singing parts in the end to make sense of the structure and harmonies, it is such crazy and funny music to play on the piano, I was skeptical in the beginning, but the more I have heard it and played it, the more I love it.
The prelude to the fourth act is notably bracing. Listening to your version as opposed to the orchestral one (I used the Neeme Järvi Chandos as reference), there is an element of magic about hearing it on pianos. Congratulations on some excellent, positively melting legato in the more lyrical sections and high-octane energy in the opening to the Prelude! There’s a real sense of theatricality about your performance of the Battle Music, too. When preparing these two, how much do you refer to the full score?
I referred to some recordings and Kristoffer, who put the music into a computer program score, referred to the full orchestra score as well. There are also some very crazy harmonies that sounds as mistakes, so we had to check again and again, but it is as it is, provoking and crazy and yet with some extremely beautiful passages; the Danish sound and songs rises from the powerful tutti orchestra passages. We added some piccolo flute since Nielsen had left a lot of it out in this arrangement (it’s also very very virtuoso to play on the piano, but also so funny) and again, we tried to find some kind of red thread in the “chaos” of voices that perhaps makes more sense in the middle of an opera than as a four-hand stand-alone piano piece. Having said that, this disc presents the entire four-hand repertoire of Nielsen, and the two pieces made complete sense for us to include in the recording,- even more funny was the fact that the Battle-music—unintentionally of course—leads up to the Third Symphony.
For me, it’s a real invitation to go and find the entire opera! I hope it will be for others, too. What methodological/compositional parallels do you find in Nielsen’s operatic writing and his symphonic writing, and what contrasts?
For Carl Nielsen composing an opera was important to him, to establish himself as an ambitious and serious composer. It was a great dream of his. An opera is somehow one of the biggest compositions a composer can make, with full orchestra, soloists, a story and collaboration with librettist, it does not become much bigger than that.. I think its fair to say that Saul & David was not the greatest opera success of all times. Carl Nielsen was though paid homage for this production after the first performances in Copenhagen where he also conducted the opera himself. And later in life he composed another opera, “Maskerade”, which became a much bigger success. With this question you catch me a little off guard, since I have only heard Saul & David a few times, on the stereo. Listening to opera is something I actually love, but it is also something that for me requires time and serenity, or even better, going to the opera and see the full performance and show. This is absolutely the best way to take it in and makes it very much easier to listen to afterwards. My partner has a thing with watching opera singers, it cracks him up, he can’t stop laughing, so I haven’t gone to an opera since I met him. I would think that watching an entire opera and not just a single aria in concert would have a different impact on him, so it’s not his fault we haven’t been there. However, this is definitely on my to-do list, and if Saul & David shows again soon I will be in line for tickets this time for sure! I so enjoy Carl Nielsen’s string quartets, concerts, symphonies, piano music etc. and I am looking forward to dive into his operas as well. Maybe we can leave this question and come back for it another time, when I am older and wiser
I just want to check, the second excerpt ends hanging in thin air .... that’s intentional, right? Presumably where the arrangement stops?
That is where the arrangement stops yes, and I discovered, that, tonality-wise, it leads up to the symphony. So we programmed the compact disc recording like that.
Finally, the arrangement by your duo partner, Kristofer Hyldig, of the Højby Rifle Club March by Nielsen's father, Niels Jørgensen (1835-1915)—now this is rare! Can you describe the background to this piece first of all?
The background is that a very dear friend of the Nielsen family, Klaus Berntsen, was the chairman of Højby Rifle Club, and Nielsen’s father composed this piece for Klaus Berntsen and the club, for a military orchestra. It is said that this was the only piece Carl Nielsen’s father (Niels “Maler” (meaning painter) Jørgensen ever composed, but this is not necessarily true. Furthermore, Klaus Berntsen was the helping hand that Nielsen needed when he went to study in Copenhagen, It is said that Berntsen arranged Nielsen’s meeting with Niels W. Gade, and in that way helped him pursuing his career as composer and violinist, getting a chance to apply for the conservatory.
The amusem*nt park “Tivoli” in Copenhagen found this “intention” of an arrangement in their archives, hidden in a book or some other music sheets, - not much was arranged yet, but it had been Nielsen’s intention to arrange the march for piano four-hands. He had already arranged it for solo piano and for military orchestra, and Kristoffer used these two arrangements to make this attempt of an arrangement a reality.
It’s only a tiny piece, and very joyous. The perfect encore, one might say. Am I right in thinking Nielsen himself wrote a fair amount of this type of lighter music (in addition to the substantial symphonies and opera etc.)?
Nielsen is a composer with huge variety in his compositions. His piano music is a very clear picture of this, starting from very easy-to-comprehend compositions to very complex ones. They are almost always with a classical and clean ending, but very often searching around in tonalities and harmonies you weren’t so familiar with yet at the time. He wrote a letter to his daughter, Ilsebil, once, about not clinging and sticking to a tonality, but rather not caring about tonalities and just letting the ideas and music flow, while still respecting “the rules” of composing. Carl Nielsen himself, was a great friend and fan of Edward Grieg, not to mention fan of Brahms, and he was actually a little scared of how people would comprehend his music, knowing that he went in other directions than the romantic composers. But as earlier described, he had the talent of composing a good melody. When this is said, Højby March is not his composition but his fathers, just to be clear.
Do you have any plans for a follow-up disc? Either with music by Nielsen or others?
I do, I actually have a huge project next year, funded by the Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen Foundation. I am going to record all of Nielsen’s piano music (piano two-hands this time) and I will also include some compositions found since the last complete recording was made. So there is “new” repertoire to dive into, not to mention a fair amount of arrangements Nielsen made himself for solo piano of his own orchestral works. It will be a three-disc project, and I am looking so much forward to it: playing Nielsen’s piano music is very fulfilling for me, plying his music makes me lose sense of time and space.
And have you been performing the music on the four-hand disc in public?
I have, - we have!, many times, and it’s been very successful every time. The audience really takes these arrangements into their heart and ears and yes, the Højby Rifle Club March is the perfect funny encore.
I do want finally to mention the recording itself, which is fantastic. It looks like a one-man show in that Preben Iwan is producer and engineer, plus in charge of mix and mastering. How did you all approach this?
How many microphones were used? It looks like six, and there's an option for Dolby Atmos for streaming also?
Preben Iwan is an amazing partner to work with, he hears absolutely everything and has a wonderful way of dealing with the psychological aspects of recording sessions. He produces in my opinion an amazing sound and yes, it is possible to stream in Dolby Atmos! I believe there are 7 microphones. I am So looking forward to hearing it when it’s there. The recording will be available on LP as well, this is also something I am really excited about, because when you put on an LP it’s like playing a video or DVD, you actually prepare more for it and pay more attention to the outcome than when you stream.
