Prodigiously gifted Danish composer and pianist Niels Viggo Bentzon (1919-2000) wrote nearly 1,000 musical works in every known classical genre and style. He retained a constantly questing and exploratory nature throughout his life, as we can hear in his five known wind quintets, recorded here by The Carl Nielsen Quintet. The results sare captivating in their own way, stoked by Bentzon’s distinctive, virtuosic language and great ingenuity.

Niels Viggo Bentzon must be said to be one of the most important figures in twentieth-century Danish musical history, as both a pianist, author and composer of nearly 1,000 works! Today, he enjoys the status of a kind of cultural phenomenon.

This album presents five works for wind quintet by Bentzon, four of them world-premiere recordings.

For this release, The Carl Nielsen Quintet has been digging out and working with Bentzon’s handwritten scores in order to present a first recording of the works.

Bentzon’s Variations consists of a series of ‘moods’, written in the worst year of the World War.

His big interest in jazz can be heard in the Bop Quintet as an almost cliché-like stylistic mask. His Wind Quintets nos. 3, 4 and 5 are beautifully crafted and filled with contrasts in unmistakable personal tonal language.

The Carl Nielsen Quintet is a young Danish ensemble formed in 2006. The members have positions in Danish and Swedish symphony orchestras alongside their career in the quintet.