Swedish bassist / cellist Lars Danielsson is a master improviser, who completely engages listeners by taking them on journeys of both pleasure and wonder, with themes which are always expressive and song-like. He is far too classy and refined a musician to indulge in superficial virtuosic display. Danielsson’s well honed, naturally lyrical improvisational lines remain at the service of the flow of the music, something particularly noticeable when he steps forward and takes on the role of soloist. These core traits are also there in his extensive and much-praised work as arranger, composer and bandleader.

Classical music and jazz are the two determining poles of Danielsson’s musical career. He says – with a smile – that “the question whether I am a jazz musician would be answered with a ‘yes’ from the musicians in the orchestra… but if I were to ask Wynton Marsalis, it would probably be a ‘no’.” Danielsson feels comfortable in the space between classical music and jazz. His first music teacher was a church organist, and the folklore of his native Sweden has also been ever-present in his musical identity. As a young cellist, he played a lot in orchestras.

With his double album, ‘Symphonized’, Lars Danielsson is now fulfilling a dream. Some of the musicians of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra were his contemporaries at the conservatoire. In 2008, he recorded his own music with this orchestra for the first time. In 2017 the orchestra’s coranglais (English horn) player Björn Bohlin was allowed to pick a composer to write for the orchestra, and he commissioned Danielsson: 2018 they played the ‘Concerto for English Horn and Contrabass’ live for the first time, then in 2019 the recording took place, this time with Carolina Grinne as soloist on English horn and oboe. Two years later, the opportunity arose to record extra material at the same location.

The classical jazz connection is of course, fraught with danger, something of which Lars Danielsson is very aware. This awareness is precisely what makes the ‘Symphonized’ recordings so effective, because he writes for orchestral musicians in the way they are used to, it doesn’t cross his mind to ask them to play jazz. “I hope to know my way around their instruments well enough to be able to write for them in a way that sounds the best possible.” A cinematic wide- screen music has emerged, with echoes of Claus Ogermann, Nino Rota or Ennio Morricone, perhaps. And from there it is not too far to thoughts of Maurice Ravel, to whom Claude Debussy once said: “Pleasure is the law.”