Denmark
Tom Birchenough
Was it just my bewilderment, or were there even more criss-crossing narratives than usual in this third series of The Bridge? As in, unusually expanded levels of human traffic, in various forms of distress, flowing under said structure.The Bridge, along with other Nordic noir that we’ve come to love, has long adopted the position that the best way to get from a to d is via x, y and z. It’s gripping in its ability to interconnect stories, but occasionally everyting gets a bit much. Somewhere early in episode nine we had Saga (whom we should really call Séga?) and new partner Hendrik (much more Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Saga saga has come round for a third turn of the wheel. Much water has flowed under The Bridge since series two. Without wishing to provoke a visit from the spoiler Stasi, it is safe to reveal that Martin is no longer in the picture. He is currently enjoying Her Danish Majesty’s hospitality, and over the water in Malmö Saga is partnerless. Indeed in the Copenhagen police force, her reputation is no longer just as an oddball with no sense of humour, communication skills or empathy. She’s the one who ratted on her closest colleague.So series three is all about palling Saga Norén (Sofia Read more ...
David Nice
Great Estonian Neeme Järvi’s two conducting sons have had varying success in London this week. Kristjan did what he could with a dog’s dinner of a Britten Sinfonia programme on Wednesday night, while older brother Paavo presumably chose the three surefire masterpieces in his Philharmonia concert yesterday evening. The climax was Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony, one of the greatest of the 20th century; certainly there’s none to cap its sheer physicality. But the same tension and uncertainties had a different kind of impact in the Flute Concerto, one of Nielsen’s later enigmas, and while Haydn’s “ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I always like watching Matthew Macfadyen, so I was appalled to see him horribly slain barely 20 minutes into this gutsy new adaptation of Bernard Cornwell's Saxon Stories. Not just slain, but then nailed to a post by the Vikings, who put a flipping great bolt in his mouth and hammered it through the back of his head.Despite this brutal display of bloodthirsty triumphalism, it was the Vikings, or some of them, who emerged as the slightly preferable faction in this tale of 9th century Saxon Britain, a murky, muddy country terrorised by the murderous Norse invaders. Unrecognisable from the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Attempting to halt an enemy army with a small unit of troops on bicycles seems impossible and improbable, but this is exactly what happened at Lundtoftbjerg in the south of Jutland in the early hours of 9 April 1940 as Germany invaded the strategically important Denmark.Although the assault was launched on more than one front, this aspect of the land campaign is the subject of the Danish film April 9th, which tells the true story of how ill-equipped, low-population Denmark had no chance. Even so, the Danish troops did what they could after first sighting the invaders at 4.50am. There were Read more ...
Richard Bratby
There’s just something about an opera orchestra when it’s let out of the pit. The Royal Danish Orchestra is more than that, of course – it makes much of its six centuries of history, and since its past members included John Dowland, Heinrich Schütz and Carl Nielsen, why wouldn’t it? But the qualities that leapt out most energetically from this concert at Symphony Hall – the Orchestra’s sole UK date on a brief European tour – were those you’d expect from a band with theatre in its blood: a vivid sense of musical characterisation, and an instinct for pacing a musical argument over an evening, Read more ...
David Nice
Queen Margrethe II of Denmark attended Nielsen’s 150th birthday concert earlier this year in Copenhagen’s glorious new concert hall. Her grandparents were there at the premiere of Nielsen’s blithest work, his cantata Springtime in Funen on 1921. Our own dear Queen has never shown such interest in music, but all the same last night's Prom celebrated the day on which she became our country’s longest reigning monarch with Gordon Jacob’s fanfare-laden arrangement of the National Anthem. Then it was off with a gust of fresh air into national celebrations of a far quirkier nature by the greatest of Read more ...
David Nice
Praise be to Carl Nielsen. Praise always, of course, to one of the greatest symphonists, and happy 150th birthday (again), but gratitude on this occasion is due to a programme mostly lining up Nielsen works rare and familiar, for getting me to the Albert Hall to witness a surely unsurpassable performance of the Brahms Violin Concerto. The sound quality, the near-perfect intonation with which Nikolay Znaider wields his Kreisler Guarneri “Del Gesù” is only the half of it; hearing such close work with an orchestra and conductor equally alert to every small detail without ever losing sight of Read more ...
David Nice
Music-lovers outside Denmark will have come to know Carl Nielsen (1865-1931) through his shatteringly vital symphonies as one of the world-class greats, a figure of light, darkness and every human shade in between. For Danes it is different: since childhood, most have been singing at least a dozen of his simpler songs in community gatherings, probably without even knowing the name of the composer.The forthright, folk-square sentiments and the melodies that seem to have part of the Danish fabric for centuries are a part of the national heritage but haven’t travelled abroad. So the general Read more ...
David Nice
No two symphonic swansongs could be more different than Sibelius’s heart-of-darkness Tapiola and Nielsen’s enigmatically joky Sixth Symphony. In its evasive yet organic jumpiness, the Danish composer’s anything but “Simple Symphony” – the Sixth’s subtitle – seemed last night to have most in common with another work from the mid-1920s, Rachmaninov’s Fourth Piano Concerto.These are the connections and contrasts that the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s chief conductor Sakari Oramo has been underlining in his six-concert journey around the Nielsen symphonies. Last night’s typically confounding finale Read more ...
Jasper Rees
They must have run out of contemporary Danes to bump off, or coalition governments to form. 1864 is something completely different from Danish national broadcaster DR, and it’s safe to presume it wouldn’t have made it onto British TV without a prior softening up of the audience. An epic drama about Denmark’s disastrous attempt to claim Schleswig-Holstein in the eponymous year – would you honestly have watched that if Sarah Lund and Birgitte Nyborg hadn't paved the way? Helpfully it’s also riddled with actors familiar from The Killing and Borgen.Apart from its cast, 1864 has in common with its Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
There’s no doubt SPOT is Europe’s tidiest music festival. In hosting SPOT, Denmark’s second-city Aarhus turns the expectation of what a festival can be around. There’s no mud, no one takes a stage late and the sound is always immaculate. Underworked stewards collect what little debris there is. The two main venues are so spotlessly non-rock they force the focus towards the music.The Aarhus Musikhuset is an airy, early-Eighties complex with a glass-walled façade reminiscent of London’s Royal Festival Hall. Inside, cool wood panelling and designer light fittings set the tone. SPOT has seven Read more ...