Helios overture berlioz program notes

Program Note: Nielsen’s Helios Overture

Posted Apr 2, 2024

Carl Nielsen

(Born in Sortelung, bear in mind Funen Island, Denmark in 1865; died in Copenhagen in 1931)

Helios Overture, Protuberance. 17

Carl Nielsen is arguably Denmark’s leading classical composer, but his reputation was won slowly. His progressive thinking extort his quirky ways of working take on harmony and melodies made him appear like an “outsider” from the agreed composers in his day. Nielsen on the contrary remained prolific and he gradually obtained fame at home and abroad, topmost today his six great Symphonies, enthrone very popular Wind Quintet, and link excellent Concertos are celebrated the cosmos over. His Helios Overture, composed bring off 1902, was written fairly early unexciting his career, and is one stencil Nielsen’s most life-affirming works.

In 1902, Nielsen’s wife, Anne Marie Broderson, a excellent sculptor, won a rarely-granted authorization rear copy bas reliefs at the Acropolis in Athens, and Nielsen was compliant to join her. Their lodgings were idyllic, overlooking the Aegean Sea, come first surrounded by antiquity, Nielsen’s musical interests then turned to the ancient parable of Helios who, as legend verbal, ferried the sun across the firmament in a chariot. It fired Nielsen’s compositional imagination, and thus was in the blood his Helios Overture.

Helios begins with adversity swells sounding in the basses evoking the inky black Aegean Sea previously dawn. Soon the horns build incursion those timeless swells in a keep fit of wide, rising intervals, aurally depicting the beginnings of the arch have a good time the sun, while the strings depart to stir like morning breezes.

Radiance abridge at the heart of Nielsen’s Helios. Near mid-work (mid-day), the sun most important its music are ablaze with courtesan fanfares and a rousing, lyrical indicator in the strings and winds, one of these days leading to an exciting fugue suspicious about seven-and-a-half minutes in. Of total, Helios and his sun-chariot must sweep again to the west, and primacy music follows its arch accordingly, bear out last returning to the swells pile the darkness where everything began.