It would have been Esbjörn Svensson's next project.

Classically trained at Stockholm's Royal College of Music, the work of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Debussy and Shostakovich was close to his heart (I once heard him warming up for the Tuesday Wonderland recording session in the Atlantis Studio in Stockholm with Shostakovitch's ‘Piano Concerto No. 1 Op. 35’), it was perhaps inevitable he would hanker to hear his music performed by a symphony orchestra. Sadly, it was not to be. However, this posthumous realisation of his ambition by his former colleagues in EST, Dan Berglund and Magnus Öström, and produced by EST's former manager Burkhard Hopper is an impressive piece of music from whatever end of the musical spectrum you choose to gaze at it and surely something that would have given him a kick. Arranged and adapted for symphony orchestra by Hans Ek, his writing has succeeded in capturing the emotionally engaging element of Svensson's playing that appealed to those both inside and outside the jazz constituency. He has even managed to evoke the subtle electronics that Svensson occasionally used, creating an ambient haze of strings to surround the melody. In 2003, Svensson himself wrote three arrangements (Dan Berglund three also) for a project with 16 strings at Jazz Baltica in 2003, and one of Svensson's arrangements, ‘Dodge the Dodo’, is enlarged by Ek here. On ‘When God Created the Coffee Break’ Ek has inserted a Svensson solo transcribed from Live in Hamburg for orchestra and it is fascinating how Svensson's improvisation sounds like a composition in its own right and highlights how he actually seems to ‘play’ silence, which left windows through which we could enter his musical world. ‘The EST Prelude’ that opens the album contains another orchestrated session solo, and hooks you right from the beginning.