Description
Johann Johannsson – Copenhagen Dreams – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack – 180 Gram Vinyl Record
Copenhagen Dreams finds Jóhann Jóhannsson writing at the scale of a city’s small details. Composed for Max Kestner’s documentary portrait of Copenhagen, the music accompanies a place that was also the composer’s home at the time. The soundtrack does not depend on a single grand theme to stand for the Danish capital. Instead, its nineteen pieces suggest a city assembled from private lives, remembered events, overlooked spaces, and the movement between them. The result is intimate even when its subject is an entire urban landscape.
The ensemble combines string quartet, clarinet, celeste, keyboards, and electronics. Those resources allow Jóhannsson to move between the grain of acoustic instruments and more diffuse, sustained sound. The music can feel carefully drawn without becoming rigid, with short melodic figures and delicate changes in texture doing much of the expressive work. Its scale is particularly suited to documentary observation: the arrangements leave space for an image or a thought rather than insisting on a dramatic conclusion at every turn.
The titles provide another route into the project. “The Jewish Cemetery on Møllegade,” “A Memorial Garden on Enghavevej,” and “A French School on Værnedamsvej” locate the music in named places. Others describe actions, memories, or propositions, as in “They Leave Everything Behind” and “He Says It’s the Future.” The specificity matters. It keeps Copenhagen from becoming an abstract backdrop and suggests the many individual stories that can occupy the same streets without ever joining into a single narrative.
Several pieces last only a minute or two, while “A Memorial Garden on Enghavevej” and the closing work have more time to unfold. That variation creates a pattern of brief observations and longer pauses. The Icelandic players bring a chamber-music sensitivity to the score, with Guðni Franzson on clarinet and bass clarinet and Ólafur Björn Ólafsson contributing piano and celesta among the credited musicians. Their acoustic detail helps give the electronic surroundings a human scale, one of the recognizable strengths of Jóhannsson’s writing.
The final pair, “Here, They Used to Build Ships” and “They Imagine the City Growing out into the Ocean,” turns from remembered industry toward an imagined future. It is an apt ending for a score concerned with how places hold both history and possibility. This 180 gram vinyl edition from Deutsche Grammophon presents the complete nineteen-track soundtrack. Copenhagen Dreams offers a quieter perspective on Jóhannsson’s film work, with the city’s complexity expressed through small forms, carefully chosen timbres, and an unusual attention to everyday life.
Brand new, never played and still sealed in the factory plastic
Track Listing
Eleven Thousand Six Hundred and Sixty-Nine Died of Natural Causes
They Leave Everything Behind
They Fed the Sparrows Leftovers and Offered Grass to Scherfig’s Turtle
An Eiffel Tower by the Lakes
Three Thousand Five Hundred and Ninety-One Benches
The Jewish Cemetery on Møllegade
They Dream They’ll Get There
A Memorial Garden on Enghavevej
A Six-Lane Highway
It Will Take Some Time
He Hit Her on the Head with “The Wind in the Willows”
He Says It’s the Future
The Song About the Hyacinths
There’s No Harm Done
They Had to Work It Out Between Them
She Loves to Ride the Port Ferry When It Rains
A French School on Værnedamsvej
Here, They Used to Build Ships
They Imagine the City Growing out into the Ocean
