Aladdin

For many European composers, “The East” was more intoxicating dream than hard reality. But when Nielsen was asked to provide music for a lavish production of Adam Oehlenschläger’s play Aladdin in 1919, he’d already spent some time in Istanbul. Not content with the normal tourist routes, Nielsen took in not just grand mosques, richly stocked markets and wild dervish dancing, but also the everyday life of the city’s inhabitants. In the event he was so horrified by what the theatre did with his Aladdin music that he published a disclaimer and set about rescuing seven numbers as an Aladdin Suite, which has since become one of his most popular works. But the complete score has also been published and, even more than the Suite, it shows how tackling this subject enriched Nielsen’s musical language: the striking use of percussion in the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies has its roots here. Vibrant, sharply colourful and refreshingly un-Romantic, Aladdin is full of Eastern-sounding elements, but Nielsen skilfully dodges most of the “oriental” conventions of his day. “Hindu dance”, for instance, is a remarkably effective piece of Asian-Nordic musical fusion, while “Chinese dance” rejects the whole clichéd cornucopia of musical chinoiserie in favour of something more dignified, more subtly “other”. Most remarkable of all is “The Marketplace in Isphahan”, which captures the riot of sounds and scents in a vivid, complex musical collage. Journeying with Nielsen through this remarkable score, we can sense an artist becoming fully himself.