Some composers really appear to know exactly what they're doing, and Poul Schierbeck (1888-1948) is certainly one of these. A private student of Nielsen, his style is conservative but somehow always fresh and confident, and his orchestration "sounds" with the inevitability of a Mahler or Ravel. In fact, the collection of four songs from The Chinese Flute immediately recalls Mahler in that it shares the same poetic source as Das Lied von der Erde, though Schierbeck's settings are miniatures, the texts supported by the most refined and apt instrumental accompaniments. Queen Dagmar, a cantata for solists, chorus, and orchestra, shows the composer working with equal success on a bolder canvas. Most of Schierbeck's work consists of vocal and choral music, songs in particular, but the luminosity of his writing for instruments makes me really want to hear some of his purely orchestral music too (there's a symphony that was first conducted by Nielsen himself). The Tinder Box takes nothing less than Hans Christian Andersen's complete short story and sets it to music for speaker and orchestra. This is the only problematic aspect of this disc, for the text is not included (it would doubtless have made for a very long booklet), and hearing someone talking at you in Danish for 20 minutes isn't fun, unless of course you happen to be Danish. So although aspects of this excellently performed and recorded disc are for local consumption only (Bravo! to Inger Dam-Jensen in the songs), Schierbeck certainly is not. Worth investigating.

--David Hurwitz