| From Svenska Dagbladet http://www.svd.se/recensioner/HTML/Page1.asp?ID=1947 Various artists - Chess på svenska (Mono music) four dots out of six When you've seen the performance, my friends, make sure to not forget the wallet in the theatre, because the record with the songs is available on the way out. Yes, the recording is a sure combination of souvenir, Christmast gift and add for the performance Chess, which is running for full houses, since the reworked Swedish version premiered in February. Already after a few weeks the ensemble went into the recording studio. You don't have to be a business genius to get that a CD is a smart move now. Only on some odd moments is Chess falling down in the mudd of 80:ies pop. And even if some of the songs don't work as well on their own on a record, as they do as a movement that leads the story further in the scenic connection, there is only a handful of the 20-something songs that sounds like something from the storage. Chess has it's own identity and offers several brilliant ideas - like borrowing from Mozart - so you can accept some fillers. On two records you can roughly follow the song order of the performance - without spoken parts. Some numbers have been remowed and others have got new titles. The opening "Historien om schack" and "Där jag ville vara" are brilliant musical tracks with a great Tommy Körberg. And the ensemble is strong: Körberg in the head, followed by Helen Sjöholm, Anders Ekborg and Josefin Nilsson, and with Per Myrberg as a kind of trickster - not bad at all. "Drömmar av glas", the duett between Körberg and Sjöholm, is a real musical ballad. (I'm allready fearing a "När guldet blev till sand"-terror on the radio). Chess på svenska on record is mostly a documentation, but also a high-class collection of songs in this genre. The Swedish translations are good and the music has some intelligent arrangements that in certain parts stand above most other material in the musical world. A lot of people will buy the box on the way out, others will have bought it on the way in. That's the thought, and the money is allready making a lot of noise in the cashier of Benny Andersson's record company. ¨*¨*¨*¨*¨ Dagens Nyheter on the other hand displays only a short and less positive review in their På Stan issue, not available on the net version, describing it mostly as a dull rendering of the musical. Thanks to ABBAMAILer Linda Granqvist, Stockholm, SWEDEN | 