Knudage Riisager(1897-1974)...anyone?

[Dundonnell]

If you like your 20th century music light, tuneful, clean, sparkling then you could do a lot worse than the Danish composer Knudage Riisager

Now, I shall be honest..I prefer my music a bit darker in tone. My favourite Danish composer, after that fantastic genius Carl Nielsen, would therefore be Vagn Holmboe. I also like some Hermann Koppel(I seem to have a huge amount of his music on cd ). I was also very taken by a CPO disc of the first two symphonies by Rudolf Simonsen a year or so ago and hope that CPO will issue the other two.

Amongst Danish romantics there are composers like Hakon Borreson, Louis Glass, Ludolf Nielsen and, rather later, Paul von Klenau. Langgaard I am still not convinced by

Riisager sounds quite different to most other Danish composers. His music is delightfully neo-classical, very French in tone, reminiscent of composers like Poulenc or Roussel. Dacapo have issued quite a lot of his music and there is a Chandos cd conducted by Rozhdestvensky. He wrote a number of ballets and indeed the music is very balletic. I had not known of Riisager as a symphonist until the latest Dacapo cd arrived. In fact he wrote five symphonies and the first is included on the new cd. The First Symphony certainly shows very little if any influence of Carl Nielsen despite being written in 1925. It does "bounce along" though in an exceedingly attractive fashion.

Not great music, not even my favourite type of music....but there are certainly a lot of people who would find this really appealling

[eschiss1]

Fairly sure I have an LP of his music (possibly the suite from "Etude" and Qartsiluni)- need to go listen again, though and thank you for the reminder

[erato]

I have a couple of DaCapo discs of Riisager, on the lighter side as you say, but very entertaining and finely orchestrated with some pretty original touches occasionally. I still haven't latched on to Holmboe in orchestral mode, but I'm starting to be pretty well won over by his quartets. What little I've heard from Koppel I like a lot, Klenau's der Cornet is very fine and makes me want to explore further, a Langgaard seems more quirky than original to me, though there are certainly stuff (like Symphony no 6) worth exploring.

The Simonsen disc impressed me as well. I really look forward to following the new Riisager symphony cycle just started. I have a lot of exploring to do of Danish postromantic repertoire.