The Hegermann-Lindencrone
Collection is a unique treasury of taped live performances, recorded at The Royal
Theatre in Copenhagen between 1948 and the late nineteen-eighties. Knud
Hegermann-Lindencrone had access to the first tape recorder in Denmark, and he
started work in December 1948 in collaboration with sound engineer Villy Bak, recording
several performances from The Royal Theatre’s bicentennial celebrations.
Hegermann’s tape collection, which finally added up to 3500 items, was bought
by The Royal Theatre in 1992; it is now in safe keeping and has been copied for
future use. Hegermann-Lindencrone stated the purpose of his archive thus. “In
the best possible way to give posterity and its theatrical historians a broad and
exact impression of the performances of The Royal Theatre”.
Several
recordings from this archive have previously been issued on LP. In connection
with the 250 years celebrations of The Royal Theatre in 1998 it was considered
appropriate that a wide selection of examples from the collection be published.
This resulted in the issue of a double CD, containing extracts from exclusively
Danish works (Stjerne-stunder. Naxos 8.112001-2).
Stimultaneously
the70th birthday Kongelig Kammersanger Ib Hansen was celebrated by the publishing
of a third CD containing memorable recordings featuring this Grand Old Man of
Danish opera. (Naxos 8.112003)
Now, two
further taped performances from the collection are being issued. “Den kongelige
Gæst”, The Royal Guest, a short Danish opera written in 1919 by the
romantic composer Hakon Børresen, here published for the first time in an
almost complete recording dating from 1949; and furthermore one of the earliest
Danish musicals “Teenagerlove”, 1962 by Ernst Bruun Olsen and Finn Savery, a
satire of the pop-industry in the early sixties, now available on 2 CDs.
It is hoped
that the issue of these three CDs will help to further the creation of a
Hegermann-Lindencrone Foundation, aimed at making many more of the recordings
in the collection accessible to the general public.
Uffe
Henriksen, Andrew Wise and Martin FitzPatric
