This album presents music from all five decades of Tage Nielsen’s career – from the impassioned piano sonata, only his third work completed in 1950, to the maturely balanced horn trio Trio Simplice and the little sonatina for clarinet and piano written in the late 1990s. We hear the two modernist nocturnes from 1960, a watershed year in Danish musical life, the deeply fascinating character pieces for piano that bring the many styles of the 1970s in Denmark into play, and the impressionistic reveries of Improvisation and Fugue from the 1980s. And with the songs to Shakespeare fragments, we get a small, hyper-concentrated insight into Nielsen’s fascinating abilities as an opera composer. Altogether highly varied music that curiously breaks with the currents of its time yet remains condensed, precise and clear in thought and expression.