From Copenhagen to Berlin.
The other day, Jeanne, Vilhelm and I said goodbye to Jens before he left Copenhagen for Berlin.
He moved away from home about six months ago, so this is not quite the classic parental moment of a child leaving the nest. That particular transition has already happened. This time, the move is from one city and one independent life to another.
Jens will spend the autumn and spring semesters at Bard College Berlin, where he is starting the first year of their BA in Economics, Politics and Social Thought.
It sounds like a fascinating combination of subjects, and Berlin is surely one of the better European cities in which to study the complicated relationship between economics, politics, ideas and society.
It will be exciting to follow his life there from Copenhagen. Although perhaps not entirely from Copenhagen: Berlin is conveniently close, so Jeanne, Vilhelm and I will obviously have to visit him a couple of times before next summer. Purely to monitor his academic progress, naturally. :-)
08/07/2026 17:36:08
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- From Copenhagen to Berlin.
The other day, Jeanne, Vilhelm and I said goodbye to Jens before he left Copenhagen for Berlin.
He moved away from home about six months ago, so this is not quite the classic parental moment of a child leaving the nest. That particular transition has already happened. This time, the move is from one city and one independent life to another.
Jens will spend the autumn and spring semesters at Bard College Berlin, where he is starting the first year of their BA in Economics, Politics and Social Thought.
It sounds like a fascinating combination of subjects, and Berlin is surely one of the better European cities in which to study the complicated relationship between economics, politics, ideas and society.
It will be exciting to follow his life there from Copenhagen. Although perhaps not entirely from Copenhagen: Berlin is conveniently close, so Jeanne, Vilhelm and I will obviously have to visit him a couple of times before next summer. Purely to monitor his academic progress, naturally. :-) (08/07/2026 17:36:08)
- Hvem er vor tids Hegel?
Jeg har netop læst en bog, der er omkring 175 år gammel, og som på en næsten irriterende måde bliver ved med at føles aktuel.
Arthur Schopenhauers Imod universitetsfilosofien udkom oprindeligt i 1851. Det er ikke en rolig akademisk afhandling. Det er et kampskrift, skrevet med en blanding af filosofisk alvor, personlig bitterhed, grov humor og et til tider næste... (07/21/2026 14:32:55)
- Some evenings become more than concerts. They become small acts of cultural remembrance.
On 16 June, Jeanne, Jens, Vilhelm, Benjamin and I spent the evening at Jazzhus Montmartre for Jørgen Leth og polsk jazz — a memorial event celebrating Jørgen Leth’s lifelong fascination with Poland and, in particular, Polish jazz. The evening combined conversation, archival film, poetry and, finally, a remarkable concert.
The event had an additional personal dimension for me. A few years ago, I had the pleasure of moderating a conversation with Jacob Dammas and Józefina Jarmużewska when their wonderful book Jørgen Leth og Polen – reportager, digte, essays was published. Seeing the story return to Montmartre in this form felt like a fitting continuation.
The musical highlight of the evening was undoubtedly hearing three outstanding musicians perform works by Krzysztof Komeda and Tomasz Stańko.
The trio consisted of Anders “AC” Christensen on double bass, Sebastian Zawadzki on piano and Anne “Efternøler” Andersson on trumpet.
For me, the concert was also a reminder of just how distinctive Polish jazz has always been. It occupies its own place somewhere between lyricism and melancholy, between structure and freedom. Komeda’s music still sounds unmistakably European, while Stańko’s trumpet transformed that tradition into something deeply personal and immediately recognisable.
Perhaps the strongest moment came when I recognised passages from Litania – Music of Krzysztof Komeda, the magnificent recording by the Tomasz Stańko Septet that has accompanied me for many years. It is one of those rare albums that never seems to age. Hearing this music live again reminded me why.
Jørgen Leth understood that Poland was never merely a country to visit. For him it became a cultural landscape populated by filmmakers, poets and jazz musicians. The evening demonstrated how naturally those worlds belong together.
Sometimes a concert is less about discovering new music than rediscovering music that has quietly accompanied one’s life for decades. (07/21/2026 10:11:36)
- One of the pleasures of the Danish summer is that it becomes possible to move almost seamlessly from one musical universe to another.
Jeanne and I had barely returned from a week at Hindsgavl Festival before we spent the final days of Copenhagen Jazz Festival in DR Koncerthuset. Within a few days we had travelled from Schubert, Pärt and contemporary chamber music to Música Popular Brasileira. It never feels like a contradiction. Quite the opposite. Good music tends to illuminate other kinds of good music.
One of the concerts we had been looking forward to most was Gilsons.
I have been listening to Brazilian popular music for decades. When I was younger, Milton Nascimento became one of those artists who permanently changed my musical landscape. His music still does. Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, João Gilberto and Milton Nascimento remain among the musicians I return to again and again.
Gilsons feels like a natural continuation of that tradition. Their music carries the same warmth, rhythmic sophistication and effortless musicality while remaining unmistakably contemporary. Their albums have become regular companions at home.
So there was never much doubt that we had to hear them live.
What surprised me most was not the music, but the audience.
I had never realised quite how large the Brazilian community in Denmark is. The hall was filled with Portuguese voices before the concert, and the entire performance unfolded in Portuguese without any apparent need for translation. It was less like attending an international concert than briefly finding oneself transported to Brazil.
Unfortunately, the sound where we were seated was not ideal. Some of the details disappeared in the acoustics.
But some concerts transcend technical imperfections.
Gilsons radiate an infectious joy in making music together, and that energy spread effortlessly throughout the audience. Sometimes the atmosphere itself becomes part of the performance.
One particularly delightful moment came when they played “Palco”, written by Gilberto Gil and known from the album A Gente Precisa Ver o Luar. It is one of those recordings that still finds its way onto my turntable from time to time. Hearing it performed by the next generation created a beautiful sense of continuity—not only between musicians, but between generations of listeners.
Music travels surprisingly well across both time and geography.
Sometimes all it takes is one evening in Copenhagen to be reminded of that. (07/21/2026 09:47:45)
- Cooling Is Becoming Critical Infrastructure. Europe Needs an Industrial Strategy for It.
Preliminary thoughts — comments, corrections and examples are very welcome.
Europe has traditionally regarded air conditioning with a mixture of suspicion and cultural superiority.
It was something associated with American offices, shopping centres and excessively cold hotel rooms. European buildings, ... (07/19/2026 12:46:03)
- Today I had the rare pleasure of hearing Charles Simonyi speak in Copenhagen about Regnecentralen and its place in the continuing evolution of computing.
Simonyi’s own story is extraordinary. In 1966, at only 17, he left Hungary and came to Denmark to work at A/S Regnecentralen. Here, alongside figures such as Peter Naur, Per Brinch Hansen and Peter Kraft, he worked on the GIER ALGOL system ... (07/17/2026 16:41:22)
- For Jeanne and me, the beginning of July has become synonymous with the Hindsgavl Festival. For almost twenty years now, we have returned to this remarkable week of chamber music.
The concerts are, of course, the main reason we come. But the festival would not be the same without the landscape surrounding Hindsgavl. The forests, the coastline and the ever-changing light over the Little Belt have become as much a part of the tradition as the music itself.
Every year I make time for a few runs through this beautiful scenery. One landmark is always part of the route: the Old Little Belt Bridge.
Completed in 1935, it was Denmark’s first bridge to connect Jutland and Funen by both road and rail. Nearly a century later, it remains an elegant piece of engineering and one of the country’s most recognisable bridges.
Today, many visitors know it for Bridgewalking, where you can walk safely along the top of the steel structure almost 60 metres above the water.
I have developed my own variation.
Bridgewalking is wonderful.
I prefer bridgerunning.
There is something uniquely liberating about running across the bridge, with the wind from the Little Belt, trains passing beside you, and the view stretching in every direction.
For many years, however, I never ran this route alone. First, Vilhelm joined me. Later, Jens became my running companion. This year, for the first time in many years, I crossed the bridge on my own.
The route has not changed.
Only life has.
Yet every step still carries memories of those earlier runs. Perhaps that is one of the quiet gifts of family traditions: they continue long after the children have grown up, reminding us that while time moves relentlessly forward, some places remain anchors for our memories. (07/08/2026 10:16:06)
- Kresten Schultz Jørgensen har på LinkedIn skrevet et tankevækkende opslag om mænd, identitet og tøj (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kresten-schultz-jorgensen-3045145_jeg-dr%C3%B8mmer-om-m%C3%A6nd-der-kommer-g%C3%A5ende-imod-share-7479936129761419264-ImRG/). Jeg er enig i én vigtig pointe: Tøj er aldrig bare tøj. Det sender signaler, og mennesker bruger beklædning til at afprøve roller... (07/08/2026 09:49:00)
- One of the things I have come to appreciate most about Hindsgavl Festival is that “classical music” is not a genre. It is a conversation spanning centuries, where Renaissance songs, Mahler, Paul Simon and brand-new Danish contemporary music can all illuminate one another.
Monday was one of those days.
The afternoon concert featured the outstanding German Ensemble Ascolta, one of Europe’s leading ensembles for contemporary music, performing Christian Winther Christensen’s Children’s Songs. The ensemble has built an international reputation for pushing the boundaries between concert, theatre and performance, and Christensen’s work seems almost written for precisely that kind of curiosity and openness.
At first glance, Children’s Songs appears to be about children. There are Duplo bricks, toys, fragments of radio sounds, playful gestures and musicians exploring their instruments almost as children investigate a newly discovered object.
But this is not children’s music.
It is music about childhood, viewed from the perspective of adulthood.
Christensen does something remarkably subtle. Rather than recreating childhood itself, he explores our memories and cultural imagination of childhood. Throughout the work, musical references emerge almost like half-forgotten recollections: Schumann’s Kinderszenen, Hindemith’s Wir bauen eine Stadt, Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder and other echoes from music history appear and disappear again. These quotations are never nostalgic decoration. They become reminders that every generation invents its own image of childhood.
The performance itself reflected this beautifully. Serious musicians of extraordinary technical accomplishment suddenly became explorers, builders and players, assembling colourful Duplo constructions while creating an astonishingly rich sonic landscape.
Later that same day I happened to listen again to Arvo Pärt’s Second Symphony, conducted by Tõnu Kaljuste, after reading Jens Carl Sanderhoff’s excellent review of the new complete recording of Pärt’s symphonies.
Quite unexpectedly, I realised that these two very different works are connected.
Pärt’s Second Symphony also contains a musical memory of childhood.
Towards the end of the symphony, after the abrasive modernist sound world, a quotation suddenly appears from Tchaikovsky’s Children’s Album, specifically Sweet Dreams. In his review, Sanderhoff quotes Pärt’s wife Nora explaining why this quotation matters:
“Here childlike innocence and tenderness are set against the cruelty of the surrounding world, and it is the tender side that emerges victorious. If it is regarded merely as a joke, the whole work is destroyed.”
That sentence stayed with me.
In Christensen’s work, childhood is something we adults try to remember but can never quite return to.
In Pärt’s symphony, childhood becomes a moral counterweight to the violence and fragmentation of the adult world.
Both works suggest that childhood is not merely a stage of life. It is a way of seeing the world that remains available to us—if we do not lose it completely.
The evening concert could hardly have provided a sharper contrast.
Soprano Anna Prohaska and pianist Eric Schneider presented Behind the Lines, a programme exploring war through the experiences of ordinary people rather than generals or heroes. Soldiers, mothers, children and those left behind became the protagonists in music spanning more than four centuries. It deserves a post of its own.
And then came the encore.
Paul Simon’s The Side of a Hill from The Paul Simon Songbook (1965).
I have been listening to Paul Simon for decades, yet somehow I had never encountered this remarkable song.
It tells of a seven-year-old boy who “lies asleep in the earth” on the side of a hill, while the war continues to rage below. Generals keep sending soldiers into battle for causes they have long since forgotten, and only a small cloud pauses to weep over the child’s grave.
After an afternoon spent reflecting on childhood through Christian Winther Christensen’s Children’s Songs, and after revisiting Arvo Pärt’s Second Symphony—with its quotation from Tchaikovsky’s Children’s Album that, as Pärt’s wife Nora explains, sets “childlike innocence and tenderness against the cruelty of the surrounding world”—Paul Simon’s song felt like the inevitable final chapter. It was no longer simply another anti-war song. It became the culmination of a day in which three very different composers, writing in three different musical languages, all returned to the same fragile truth.
Perhaps childhood is not merely something we leave behind.
Perhaps it is the measure by which we should judge the adult world.
And perhaps the most important question raised by all three works is also the simplest:
What becomes of us when we forget what a child’s life is worth? (07/07/2026 13:07:27)
- Every year at Hindsgavl Festival I discover music that stays with me long after the final applause.
This year, one of the defining musical experience for me was undoubtedly the performance of Rune Glerup’s Descriptions of the Ephemeral – Piano Trio No. 2, performed by Trio con Brio Copenhagen.
The trio was written especially for Trio con Brio and premiered in Berlin earlier this year before arriving at Hindsgavl. It consists of five movements—Appearance, Simple, Scherzo Without End, Still Life, Night and Disappearance—whose titles already suggest that this is music concerned less with dramatic events than with fleeting states, transformations and the passing of time. As the programme notes beautifully put it, Glerup invites us to dwell in “the inner life of sound”, where even the smallest changes become meaningful.
Rune Glerup is one of the most interesting voices among the generation of Danish composers born around the turn of the millennium. His music does not seek immediate effect. It asks for attention. It rewards patience.
Trio con Brio Copenhagen could hardly have wished for a closer relationship with the composer. The ensemble—violinist Soo-Jin Hong, cellist Soo-Kyung Hong, and pianist Jens Elvekjær—has collaborated with Glerup for years, having premiered his earlier Movements for Piano Trio in 2017. They possess that rare quality of sounding less like three exceptional musicians and more like a single musical organism. It is no coincidence. The trio consists of two sisters and a married couple, and after decades of performing together they have developed an almost uncanny musical intuition.
What made the experience even richer was that I was fortunate enough to hear the work twice.
The following morning, after an artist talk with Mathias Hammer and Rune Glerup, Trio con Brio performed the work once more. Hearing it for a second time transformed the experience. What had initially seemed elusive suddenly became coherent. Musical ideas that had merely appeared on first hearing now revealed relationships, echoes and memories.
One remark from the artist talk has remained with me. The discussion turned to the importance of silence—to what happens between the notes. Music, Glerup suggested, is not exhausted by what is written in the score. It also unfolds in the spaces, in the acoustics, in the resonance that continues after a tone has disappeared. As one of the reflections during the conversation expressed it: “Go beyond the notation and find something that evolves in the room and with the acoustic. The main thing is not just about notation.”
Listening again with that thought in mind changed everything.
The pauses were no longer absences. They became part of the composition itself. They allowed sounds to breathe, memories to linger, and the listener’s imagination to complete what the notation deliberately leaves unfinished.
Perhaps that is precisely what Glerup means by “the ephemeral”. Music is never simply the notes on the page. It is what briefly comes into being between performers, acoustics and listeners—and then disappears again.
It is remarkable how many internationally significant composers Denmark has produced over the past decades. Bent Sørensen, Hans Abrahamsen, Per Nørgård, Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, Simon Steen-Andersen, Niels Rønsholdt—and now composers such as Rune Glerup continue to demonstrate that contemporary Danish music remains among the most imaginative anywhere.
Finally, my sincere thanks once again to Cecilia Gaeta, whose beautiful photographs capture the atmosphere of Hindsgavl Festival far better than words alone ever could. (07/05/2026 13:20:48)