Edward Gardner’s nine years as principal conductor of the Bergen Philharmonic came to an end in July 2024, but their recording projects together continue to appear. This is the third instalment of Gardner’s Nielsen series with the orchestra, after previous discs featuring the third and fourth symphonies. Like its predecessors, the latest release pairs a symphony with one of Nielsen’s concertos, in this case the Fifth Symphony, completed in 1922, with the work for clarinet composed six years later.

Both works, as well as the early Helios Overture, receive outstanding performances from the Bergen players, and Gardner controls the teeming textures of the symphony with great refinement. Perhaps there’s just a little too much control towards the close of the magnificent opening movement, when the snare-drum player is instructed to do his best to disrupt the rest of the orchestra; a bit more wildness might have made that passage even more powerfully effective, and the surge into the second movement that follows even more cathartic.

Alessandro Carbonare is the soloist in the Clarinet Concerto, which with the earlier work for flute was all that Nielsen lived to complete of his plan to compose concertos for each member of the Copenhagen Wind Quintet. It too has a prominent role for a snare drum, a counterpoint to the rather irascible writing for the solo clarinet, which Carbonare handles with great aplomb; there may be more excitable performances of the concerto on disc than this one, but not many that are so elegant and suave.

Stream it on Apple Music (above) or on Spotify