Der Spiegel 03 2023

Good Morning Susie Soho peaked on the Swedish pop album chart at 15, above the likes of Whitney Houston, Britney Spears and Pearl Jam, yet was named album of the year for 2000 by the critics in the British magazine Jazzwise. At the same time, Svensson was on the covers of two German jazz magazines, was the cover feature, along with Jacky Terrasson, in the French magazine Jazzman and was hailed by the German news weekly Der Spiegel as the future of jazz piano (together with Brad Mehldau). Clearly then it's not unreasonable to suggest that this album is making waves across Europe. That the cutting edge can live on without necessarily inhabiting volatile experimentation is hardly new, and Svensson's trio, while darkly lyrical, is also fiercely contemporary…

Young Danish-Hungarian organist David Bendix Nielsen makes his solo album debut with a recording that weaves the music of J.S. Bach and Arvo Prt into a rich recital. By combining composers with such apparently different musical approaches, Nielsen sheds new light on both, so that listeners hear unexpected parallels between the music of the German Baroque and that of 20th-century Estonia. One characteristic shared by both composers is that of a deep spirituality, as heard in chorale preludes and fugues by Bach, or in Prts hypnotic tintinnabulation in Spiegel im Spiegel. There is secular music, too, in the form of Bachs organ transcription of Vivaldis Concerto in D minor. David Bendix Nielsen is the organist of St. Marks Church in Copenhagen and teaches at the Royal Danish Academy of Music. He won the Lonie Sonning Talent Prize in 2018, and from 2022 to 2023 was a recipient of the Young Cultural Elite scholarship from the Danish Arts Foundation.