Bach & Part

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 Pärt 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 Pärt's hypnotic 'tintinnabulation' in Spiegel i'm Spiegel. There is secular music, too, in the form of Bach's organ transcription of Vivaldi's Concerto in D minor. David Bendix Nielsen is the organist of St. Mark's Church in Copenhagen and teaches at the Royal Danish Academy of Music. He won the Léonie Sonning Talent Prize in 2018, and from 2022 to 2023 was a recipient of the Young Cultural Elite scholarship from the Danish Arts Foundation.