A whole six weeks ago I moved from London to Copenhagen. And you know how it is when you spend significant time in a foreign land – you start to notice how things are done differently, where the priorities lie. I’ve learned quickly, for example, that you’d be better off running naked through the streets shouting anti-Danish profanities than you would putting your recycling into the wrong bin (of the designated six varieties of recycling bin, that is).

It’s been said before, but they do culture differently here too. Most evenings, a few minutes before 8pm, the state broadcaster DR transmits a tiny television show called ‘Dagens sang’, roughly translatable as ‘Today’s song’. What you get is one of DR’s three vocal ensembles (or sometimes a ‘guest’ choir) singing a short choral song by a Danish composer. The choir isn’t stood in a church or concert hall dressed in black; it’s positioned somewhere strange and resonant – on a beach, in a library, around a sculpture, by a suburban block of flats, in a restaurant – and subtly costumed for the occasion (sometimes, even, in black).

It’s the music that matters, of course, and the sound is recorded separately in an appropriate acoustic. But the luminous, music-infused video directing turns ‘Dagens sang’ into something absolutely televisual. Stumbling upon the show in between episodes of Bergerac and Air Crash Investigation (two of DR’s favourite imports) is a tonic; unfortunately for DR, it often has the effect of making me switch off the television for the rest of the evening in search of something equally stimulating (unless, that is, they’ve immediately trailed a concert transmission from DR’s exceptional symphony orchestra, which seems to broadcast on television most weeks too).

The first ‘Dagens Sang’ I caught was a radiant little song by Niels la Cour (see Gramophone’s May issue for a review of his latest disc) sung by DR’s girls choir in a big industrial lift. But often the featured songs are by Nielsen. There are nearly 300 to choose from, after all. And as Denmark marks the 150^th anniversary of Nielsen’s birth this week, it will be those songs, ingrained in this country’s educational and institutional lives, that most Danes remember him for. If you stopped a random selection of them in the street, says Niels Krabbe, editor in chief of the Carl Nielsen Edition, ‘many will be able to name and sing 15 or 20 of Nielsen’s songs’.

DR is celebrating the Nielsen anniversary in various ways, not least using its choirs and symphony orchestra for a gala concert at its spectacular concert hall tonight (Nielsen’s actual birthday). But it has also given over some of its ‘Dagens sang’ slots to musicians from outside the classical world, and invited them to cover songs by the composer. It seems a natural gesture here, where Carl Nielsen is the nearest thing Danes have to John Lennon.

On Sunday night, DR broadcast a performance of one of Nielsen’s most spare, focused and moving songs, ‘Tit er jeg glad’, courtesy of the singer-songwriter (and erstwhile presenter of DR’s popular music show Boogie) Sys Bjerre. You might not like it. But I do. In fact, I doubt I’ll hear a more moving or evocative performance of any song by Nielsen this year (though I have to admit, this one has always been a favourite). ‘Oft I am glad, still may I weep from sadness’ Bjerre sings in words from Bernhard Severin Ingemann’s poem; ‘Oft do I love, still may I sigh from coldness.’ The loneliness of the Nielsen-Ingemann creation is underlined not just in the musical arrangement, but in the video too. And that insecurity in Bjerre’s voice, coupled with her hesitant articulation and confident tuning…well, enough said.

I’m not sure I quite ‘get’ rapper Pede B’s take on Nielsen’s ‘Tunge mørke natteskyer’, and it’s fair to say that Sophia Ziegler Nohr’s garden centre rendition of ‘Saenk kun dit hoved du blomst’ has strayed too far into synthetic pop, unless that’s a conscious, ironic reflection on the text (quite possible). Either way, more Nielsen covers will appear this week and whatever their success, I applaud the very fact that this is happening; the fact that artists like these, whose fans might never have had Nielsen’s anniversary drawn to their attention, have paid such sincere homage to a dead musician who many would (incorrectly) presume occupies a musical tradition different to theirs. I applaud the fact that they’ve bestowed the music video treatment on the songs and then broadcast them on prime time television. I dream of a day when I could applaud UK chart-toppers for taking a similar approach to Britten or Purcell, but a dream it will remain because that won’t ever happen. And if by some strange quantum leap it did, it wouldn’t be broadcast on TV at five to eight on a weeknight.

But then, Nielsen’s determination to become (or, given his lineage, ‘remain’) part of his country’s vernacular musical heritage is pretty much unique among composers of symphonies and operas. He acted on that impulse because he was determined that every Dane should know music they could enjoy and be proud to call ‘Danish’. That’s why Denmark is celebrating his anniversary so widely, cross-genre projects and all. But those little songs also present a huge opportunity, at a time like this, to connect millions of Danes with the thriving and undeniably more ‘niche’ classical music life of their country. Nielsen saw no distinction between the two, which is why those cover versions feel so apt.