The Danish years and the Holmboe cycle

Denmark is a small country with a large orchestral infrastructure. A population of under six million supports full professional symphony orchestras in Copenhagen, Aarhus, Aalborg and Odense, and those orchestras record far more than their size suggests, because Scandinavian labels have made a speciality of repertoire the bigger companies leave alone. A Welsh conductor working in Jutland in the 1990s was inside one of the most productive recording cultures in Europe.

The two Danish orchestras, and what the titles mean

The two Danish orchestras came to Hughes in different ways and carried different obligations. At Aalborg he was principal conductor from 1994 to 1999, which is the artistic headship of an orchestra under one of its several names. A principal conductor plans the season, has a decisive voice in appointing players, and conducts more weeks than anyone else on the roster. Music director and chief conductor describe the same job. A principal guest conductor, by contrast, commits to a smaller block of weeks and carries no administrative duty.

Aarhus was different. The association began in 1989 and it is the Aarhus Symphony Orchestra, resident in Musikhuset Aarhus since that hall opened in 1982, that plays on the Holmboe cycle. A recording relationship of that length depends on a settled working understanding between a conductor and a body of musicians: the same players, the same acoustic, the same habits of balance, sustained across years rather than assembled for a week.

Vagn Holmboe, the composer at the centre of the project

Vagn Holmboe, who lived from 1909 to 1996, was the most substantial Danish symphonist of the generation after Carl Nielsen. He trained at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen and then in Berlin, collected folk music in Romania in the 1930s, and taught for many years in Copenhagen, where Per Norgard was among his pupils. The modal, additive material he found in eastern European folk music never left his writing.

His output is very large and it is concentrated in two forms. There are thirteen numbered symphonies. There are twenty numbered string quartets, with a twenty-first, Quartetto Sereno, left unfinished at his death and completed by Norgard. The quartets circulate most widely among players, for the reason quartets always do: four musicians can programme a cycle an orchestra cannot afford to attempt. The symphonies had no comparable currency before they were recorded complete.

Metamorphosis technique, in practice

Metamorphosis technique, in Holmboe's practice, means growing an entire movement out of one small cell, usually an interval or a rhythmic figure of three or four notes. The distinction worth holding on to is this. Variation form states a theme and then dresses it: the theme survives each variation intact underneath. Development in the Beethoven sense breaks a theme into fragments, argues with them, and resolves the argument by restating the theme. Metamorphosis does neither. The cell changes continuously and does not change back. Each stage grows out of the one before it, and by the end of the movement the music is a long way from where it started without ever having jumped.

What that gives a listener is forward pressure. Nothing is recapitulated, so nothing feels like a homecoming, and the interest lies in tracking one shape through its alterations. It is a method with obvious debts to Sibelius, and it rewards a second hearing, because the cell is easier to recognise once its later forms are familiar.

What recording a complete cycle of fourteen symphonies involves

Recording a complete cycle of fourteen symphonies is a commitment measured in years, not sessions. The Holmboe project ran from June 1992 to January 1996, which is 43 months, and the sessions had to be fitted into the working season of a busy regional orchestra alongside its concerts. A label planning a cycle is planning a catalogue: consistent forces, one hall, one engineering team, and a house sound that makes fourteen works issued over four years sound like one set.

The last row matters most. Complete cycles of twentieth-century symphonists are very often posthumous, undertaken once a reputation has settled and the composer can no longer comment. This one was finished while Holmboe was alive to hear it.

The Sinfonia in Memoriam, and why the cycle is fourteen works and not thirteen

The Sinfonia in Memoriam, Op. 65, sits outside the numbered thirteen, which is why a complete Holmboe symphony cycle is a set of fourteen works. Holmboe wrote it at Hughes's request, and Hughes gave its premiere. That is an unusual thing to find inside a recording project. A conductor building a cycle normally inherits a fixed body of finished scores and his decisions are interpretative. Here one item in the set exists because he asked for it, and the first performance of that item was his as well.

Symphony orchestra or philharmonic orchestra

The difference between a symphony orchestra and a philharmonic orchestra is a matter of names, not of music. Nothing about the size, the constitution or the repertoire follows from the word on the letterhead, and the Aalborg Symphony Orchestra and the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra are the same kind of body doing the same kind of work.

The Holmboe set remains the clearest single answer to what Hughes did in Denmark, because it is the kind of work that cannot be done quickly or by one person. Fourteen symphonies, one orchestra, one label, 43 months, and a composer alive at the end to see them gathered in a box for the first time.

Also in this programme

• Owain Arwel Hughes, conductor: the working life in orderA biography of the working life
• The London orchestrasPhilharmonia and the Royal Philharmonic
• Boult, Haitink and Kempe: how a conductor was trainedThe teachers: Boult, Haitink and Kempe
• The orchestraHow a symphony orchestra is put together