Who Framed Roger Rabbit Danish National Symphony Orchestra, Christian Schumann

Bernard Herrmann, born in New York in 1911 to Russian immigrants, is best known today as a composer of film music. Most notably he worked with Alfred Hitchcock on classic productions such as North by Northwest, Vertigo, and Psycho, as well as on Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. But despite his strong ties to Hollywood, Herrmann always thought of himself as a composer who worked in film, and never as a ‘mere’ film composer.

The symphonies of Danish composer Carl Nielsen, deeply rooted in the Danish landscape and culture yet with universal appeal, are among the great works of the symphonic repertoire. Deutsche Grammophon is delighted to include Nielsen's complete symphonies in its catalogue - and to do so with an orchestra closely associated with the composer and a conductor open to new ideas and inspiration. The Danish National Symphony Orchestra has been internationally renowned for its interpretations of Carl Nielsen's music since the composer himself conducted the orchestra in the 1920s and 1930s. Now, under its principal conductor Fabio Luisi, the orchestra has recorded its special interpretation of Nielsen's symphonies for the first time after many years of acclaimed live performances. "The DNSO plays with wonderful commitment and finesse."

For Anyone who finds the textual/musical idiom of Ein deutsches Requiem difficult to accommodate, this mixture of sacred and secular pieces could serve as a way into the choral music of a very great composer.

A wonderfully gifted child, the Danish composer Rued Langgaard (1893-1952) occupies a completely unique place in the history of music, in which he is only just beginning to feature. A virtuoso organist at the age of eleven, he composed a First Symphony at the age of seventeen. An hour long, it was performed for the first time by no less than the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 1913. But Langgaard was too visionary, too original, too far from fashion and the common world to be successful.

Bent Sørensen’s quietly spoken universe incorporates loneliness, nostalgia and a feeling of loss and leave leave-taking. Of the works on this album, his triple concerto, L’Isola della Città (2015), has a purity that makes it one of the composer’s most immediate and gripping orchestral works. His dramatic Second Symphony (2019) dives into the resonance of music’s classical history, where every sound is considered with the greatest care and refinement.

The wind quintet made up of the principal players of the Danish National Symphony are fairly well-known from their earlier recordings. And Ralf Gothóni, who joins them for Poulenc's Sextet for Piano and Winds, is a strikingly sensitive pianist, particularly in chamber settings. The program itself is very strong; it comprises basically the core of 20th-century French wind quintet literature: the Poulenc Sextet, Ibert's 'Trois Pièces brèves,' Françaix's First Wind Quintet, and Milhaud's 'Le Cheminée du roi René.'