London Symphony Orchestra/Colin Davis LSO Live ***

Carl Nielsen wrote his first symphony in 1892, when he was 26 years old. That makes it a year older than either Dvorák's New World Symphony or Tchaikovsky's Pathétique. But the Dane's work often breathes the atmosphere of a much later era. The music, which is full of piquant harmonic twists, is genially robust, sometimes blunt, sometimes oblique, and apparently without a shred of romantic angst. The Sixth Symphony of 1925, the last Nielsen would complete, is perplexing in its disparateness, and has even been dubbed "the most profoundly post-modern piece composed prior to the post-modern era". Colin Davis's strongly-delivered approach is to draw Nielsen towards the mainstream, especially in the First Symphony, to find ways of tightening the logic, to regularise and tidy the manners of a composer who likes going off on strange tangents http://iti.ms/HEwM0K MICHAEL DERVAN