Press Cuttings

However, on Tuesday night, the acclaimed Danish organist Ulrik Spang-Hanssen presented an entire programme of music by the great Danish/German composer Dietrich Buxtehude (1637-1707), and proved yet again the worthiness and value of this wonderful instrument. There can tend to be a sameness about one-composer recitals: same sound-world, same style, similar stop selections, same structures. Not so tonight. This concert demonstrated that the energetic creativity and propulsive verve of the composer, the ability and imagination of the organist and the unimaginable flexibility of this incredible instrument combined to offer a rare and thrilling experience.

There is no one who has shown the wealth of imagination and creativity in baroque music like Ulrik Spang-Hanssen, who is also a fine jazz musician. His recordings of Buxtehude’s collected works for organ are entirely unique. It is a new discovery of what this music is about.

(About USH’s recording of the Bach/Vivaldi concertos): Da geht aber dann richtig die Post ab! Hier zuzuhören macht richtig Spass, “geht ’runter wie Öl” und mach süchtig.

At the same time, the quick tempi give Spang-Hanssen an outlet for his very physical musicality. Not for nothing is he also a jazz pianist. His playing has a gripping energy – also in the few pieces that, with a splendid pleno sound, stride forward more moderately – and, as few can, makes the organ swing. The elastic rhythmic is effectively supported by numerous free ornaments or the gently rocking bass of the pedal. Movement after movement shines with infectious gaiety.

Ulrik Spang-Hanssen is a highly gifted musician (besides being an organist he is also an eminent jazz pianist), who uses all the tricks of the trade in ‘stylus phantasticus’. Certainly there are questions about some interpretations. Tempi and registrations were occasionally very unconventional, but all the individual sounds of the organs were excellent and as a listener one is certainly not bored in the company of Ulrik Spang-Hanssen and Master Diedrich.

Ulrik Spang-Hanssen’s name is printed in bold type in Danish musical interpretation with his rendering of Buxtehude’s collected works for organ.

Ulrik Spang-Hanssen belongs in the inner circle of the hard core of the elite of the best Danish organists, and with liveliness and pleasure he cultivates many different specialities.

... an extremely subjective, playful, and poetic musician and a markedly rhetoric understanding of the music. This is playing on the ends of the nerves, daring, vital, and magnificently visionary.

Spang-Hanssen plays with verve, control, articulation and imaginative ornamentation.

He is willing to go to extremes, can be more reckless than is usual in church music. But he plays with warmth and sincerity, always with a vibrant musical nerve.

Exécution spectaculaire, débordante de vie, pleine de densité spirituelle servie par une technique hors paire: rien de rigide, d’emprunté; und toucher toujours sensible rendant superbement le sens de la musique primesautière du maître de Lübeck.

Ulrik Spang-Hanssens playing overcomes any potential worries about hearing Buxtehude other than on a North German organ. He has a real sense of rhythmic vitality. His interest in jazz piano adds a stylistic zest to the great stylus phantasticus toccatas.

Spang-Hanssen relishes the opportunity for free shaping of melodic and rhythmic ideas. He enlivens the musical line, often too imperturbable and stoic in the hands of other organists. To wit, some movements amount to unbridled jazz. The florid cantus firmus of the Es spricht der unweisen Mund wohl could easily pass for a Thelonius Monk riff or an Ella Fitzgerald scat solo, such are its swing and wightlessness.

And the conclusion is quite unforgettable: Carl Nielsen’s grand “Commotio”. The tremendous pipes shake the old house of God right up to the throne of Queen Elizabeth II. But at the same time, Spang-Hanssen sets even the smallest cheep in the right place. Have you ever heard anything better?