Goods, the second album by Sweden’s Edda Maganson was one of last year’s highlights. With a playful jazz sensibility which intertwined with a quirky pop, Magnason’s approach was unusual and refreshing. Coinciding with the release of her new EP, theartsdesk premieres the video for its lead track “Jona”.Magnason’s time is currently filled playing the lead in a biopic about the legendary Swedish jazz singer Monica Zetterlund. Being shot in Sweden and New York, it’s directed by Denmark’s Per Fly (the director of 2010’s The Woman Who Dreamed of a Man, made for Lars von Trier's company Zentropa).“ Read more ...

Carole King: The Legendary DemosLisa-Marie Ferla For one whose appreciation of Carole King, the songwriter, has never truly been distinguishable from her appreciation of Carole King, the performer, a listen to the treasure trove that is The Legendary Demos is a curious exercise indeed. Perhaps it’s the presence on this collection of early cuts of six tracks that would later appear on Tapestry, King’s 1971 breakthrough in her own right, but even with the knowledge that many of these recordings were put together as showcases to be pitched to other artists, it is hard to dissociate them from a Read more ...

"Does he know she's a bit odd?" asks one of Saga Noren's Swedish police colleagues, on hearing that Danish copper Martin Rohde (Kim Bodnia) is working with Noren on a new murder case. Well, he's begininning to get the idea. He's seen her forbid an ambulance to cross her crime scene perimeter, even though it was carrying a new heart for a critically ill patient. She drags Rohde out of bed in the middle of the night to track down a piece of evidence, then when he delivers it to her at police HQ she barely says thanks and shuts the door in his face. Apparently she never eats meals.With her long Read more ...

Seeing Miss Julie played in-the-round would, I suspect, have delighted Strindberg. In his preface to the play, he was much exercised about the setting, presuming a proscenium stage: a single set, asymmetrical scenery, no clutter, no “tiresome” exits through doors, no footlights. And so on.I imagine that he didn’t envisage theatre-in-the-round, but he longed for some way of breaking the custom of formal staging (“nothing left to the imagination”) and tidy dialogue. He wanted actors playing “for the audience, not with it”, sometimes even having their backs to the audience whilst speaking. Read more ...

It began with a warning. Opening the fourth Tallinn Music Week, Estonia’s President Toomas Hendrik Ilves cautioned, “In a free society, it’s risk-free. In an un-free society, it’s not risk-free. It’s not all fun.” From behind a hotel conference room lectern, he then began rolling a video of Russia’s Pussy Riot being arrested in Moscow a few days earlier. Not everyone can make their point, make their music, choose how they want to get it across.The contrast between Pussy Riot’s fate and a festival that celebrates new music in all its forms, held in a country bordering Russia, was marked by Read more ...

“I guess it's jazz, but it's not what jazz was... if you have to call it something... " Esbjörn Svensson was the leader, pianist and main composer of e.s.t. and at the time of his death in a scuba-diving accident on 14 June, 2008, it would seem the band had the world at its feet.Although the band were formed in Sweden in 1993, it wasn’t until From Gagarin’s Point of View in 1999 that they reached a large international audience, and a series of acclaimed albums such as 2006’s Tuesday Wonderland consolidated them as the archetypal modern jazz band. Partly responsible for shifting jazz's centre Read more ...

As concert venues go, this one is perfect – a barn-like structure, whose pine timbers emit a fragrance not unlike that of a sauna, whose long glass windows look out across oxon-red wooden Swedish farmsteads and the frozen expanse of Lake Orsasjön. The Vattnäs Konsertlada is the labour of love of local girl, the international opera singer Pers Anna Larsson, and is being used at Sweden's by now best-known music festival, Vinterfest, for the first time.Guests are streaming into the barn, stepping on pine branches strewn across the entrance to stop them sliding on the ice. Meanwhile the artists Read more ...

Although the four days of Norway’s 15th by:Larm Festival were dominated by the presentation of the second annual Nordic Music Prize, there were plenty of other distractions: a sobering tour of Norwegian black metal’s infamous sites, a talk by legendary Nigerian drummer Tony Allen, what felt like millions of shows in millions of venues, and weather confounding all expectations of what Oslo ought to be like in February.Previous visits to by:Larm have involved negotiating snow three-foot deep, urban pack ice and temperatures of minus 18 centigrade. This year, the sun shone, temperatures hovered Read more ...

He played chess with Death in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, was crucified as Jesus in George Stevens’s The Greatest Story Ever Told and diced with the devil in William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. There’s something magnicent and elemental about the life and work of Max Von Sydow. Born in 1929, he has looked like a craggy old monument for at least 30 years.For several decades Von Sydow has been Hollywood’s Nordic figleaf – an emissary from the farthest shores of European arthouse cinema who gives Hollywood integrity and ballast. No one felt that more keenly than Woody Allen, Bergman’s self- Read more ...

Although the title of this new DVD box set was a given considering the nature of the films included, all six films collected are – whatever their reputation, levels of nudity and explicitness – sober-minded, hardly measuring up to any standard of what normally constitutes erotica. Three are dry sex education films, presented by real-life psychologists, while the other three are bizarre examinations of an alienated young women in relationships that involve power play, subjugation and abuse. Like nightmare, no-budget counterparts of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage.Swedish cinema Read more ...

The surprises linger longest. The things you’re not prepared for, the things of which you’ve got little foreknowledge. Lykke Li’s Wounded Rhymes was amazing, and she was equally astonishing live, too. Fleet Foxes's Helplessness Blues was more than a consolidation on their debut and The War On Drugs’s Slave Ambient was a masterpiece. But you already knew to keep an eye on these three. Things arriving by stealth had the greatest impact.This year, music again proved it has the power to surprise. Terrific albums from unknown quantities (of varying degrees) like Rayographs, Huntsville (from Norway Read more ...