From Deseret News archives:
Danish composer's works tailor-made for violinist, pianist
Niels W. Gade is the most famous composer Denmark produced in the 19th century. A household name in his homeland, he's relatively unknown elsewhere.
He produced a large body of works in all genres, including symphonies, operas, ballets, oratorios and chamber music. These show him to be a remarkably gifted composer whose talent was recognized by his older contemporaries, Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann.
Violinist Hasse Borup, himself a Dane, is hoping to make Gade a little more familiar to a broader audience. Borup, who teaches at the University of Utah, has teamed up with pianist and colleague Heather Conner in a program featuring Gade's three violin and piano sonatas.
The duo has taken this program on the road for several concerts in the Intermountain West, and Sunday they played it for an appreciative audience in Libby Gardner Concert Hall as part of the U.'s Sundays@7 series. (They will record this program soon for Naxos, with a tentative release date set for this fall.)
Borup and Conner have appeared together numerous times since Borup joined the U. a couple of years ago. Theirs is an attractive and dynamic partnership. They approach the music with the same intense determination and with an obvious enthusiasm that they impart on their playing. It's pure pleasure watching them perform together, and one can immediately tell they enjoy what they're doing.
The program of three Gade violin sonatas seems to be tailor-made for them. Their playing was infused with vitality and dynamic drive, but tempered with finely honed romantic sensibility and lyricism.
These works span Gade's entire creative life. They offer wonderful insight into how he developed as a composer, from the youthful first sonata — written when he was 25 and clearly influenced by Mendelssohn and Franz Schubert — to the more mature second and finally the third, with its expansive scheme and Nordic earnestness.
Gade dedicated his first sonata to Clara Schumann, and it has the largest piano part of the three, which contrasts with the violin's simpler and more straightforward passages. There is a delightful lightness to the work, however, that both Borup and Conner captured with their expressive (and in Conner's case dexterous) playing. Conner handled her part with ease and didn't in any way overpower her partner's playing. The two were well balanced.
