Going on tour with Nielsen’s 4th Symphony.

All of Nielsen’s symphonies bring surprises: Nielsen’s very personal language, the instrumentation, the proportions, the courage to break boundaries, the irony, the wit, and the deepness. We find all this in his 4th Symphony, which the Danish National Symphony Orchestra will bring on tour in January under my direction. It started in 2016 with Kim Bohr, the orchestra’s general manager, asking,” Would you conduct Nielsen with us?” I said, “Why not?” although Nielsen was almost unknown to me (I had performed before only his 4th Symphony in Bregenz with my Vienna Symphony Orchestra, but I didn’t remember much of it). My first project was his Second Symphony, and I soon realized that it was me learning from the orchestra rather than the opposite. Those musicians – my musicians – have Nielsen in their DNA, and they were nevertheless surprised about my approach; new to them, probably fresher, more central European, ignoring traditions, and very hardcore towards the text and the pacing of the phrases. We performed all of them and recorded them for Deutsche Grammophon, even winning the Gramophone Prize for best recording of the year 2023. Now, we present this Symphony at some of our tour concerts in different European cities.

Read more about our European tour here.