Biography

Bent SORENSEN

© Lars Skaaning 

Bent Sørensen is one of northern Europe’s most performed and admired composers. His triple concerto L’isola della Città was awarded the 2018 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, the so-called Nobel Prize for composition. Sørensen’s music is recognizable in an instant. In a mark of its resonance and significance, its signature sound has been imitated countless times.

The Danish composer first came to prominence in the 1980s. He found his voice early and never changed direction. If you were to map Sørensen’s style, his fellow composer Karl Aage Rasmussen has written, its development would resemble growth rings in a tree.

That style started to fix itself in the consciousness of the European music scene with the first performance of Sørensen’s 1993 violin concerto Sterbende Gärten (‘Decaying Garden’), which later won the Nordic Council Music Prize. The composer’s own programme note to the piece refers to the decaying, fading frescoes around Florence and Rome. ‘The way culture becomes nature over time has been an inspiration for all my pieces,’ Sørensen wrote.

Sørensen’s music floats and percolates of its own accord, haunted by remembrances of things past, often dragged down by a deep sorrow induced by exquisite beauty. Silence has become the aesthetic basis for much of Sørensen’s work, the ‘white wall’ that becomes increasingly dominant as the composer’s narratives resolve or, more likely, dissolve. Sometimes, a Sørensen score will instruct an entire symphony orchestra to lay down its instruments and hum quietly together. Sometimes, it will ask the orchestra’s musicians to walk off stage, one by one, until only one or two remain.

Many of Sørensen’s works have a habit of finding solace just when it’s too late. In his Trumpet Concerto, the solo instrument discovers its full voice after the piece has effectively finished. In his piano concerto La mattina, the piano tries to sing out the Lutheran chorale Ich ruf’ zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ but can only find the confidence to do so, for eight seconds, just as the curtain falls. In L’isola della Città (2017) the trio of soloists finally gets to play a consonant chord, a simply G minor triad, just as the concerto evaporates.

Despite its extreme emotional fragility, Sørensen’s music is that of pure aesthetic indulgence, crammed with as much beauty as is tastefully possible. He is a modernist composer who adores tonal intervals and allows himself to be seduced by the simple shape of a song or hymn. A spectral regard for colour and texture lurks underneath Sørensen’s harmonic and schematic principles, making space as important as time.

In his complementary movements to Johannes Ockeghem’s unfinished Requiem – a series of choral movements that spanned most of Sørensen’s career to date when they were gathered together in 2012 – we hear the twisting thread of the Renaissance polyphony the composer so loves. But it is rendered in Sørensen’s characteristic harmonic smudging; the music pulled between the magnetic poles of warm, Romantic tonality and rich, Schoenbergian atonality. The work laid foundations for Sørensen’s choral magnum opus, St Matthew Passion (2021).

Sørensen has worked in every classical music genre and pushed at their boundaries. His 2009 concerto for orchestra, choir, actors and audience Sounds Like You was conceived in part for the embracing auditorium of Jean Nouvel’s DR Concert Hall in Copenhagen and plants

musicians and actors throughout a large concert hall. The piece leads its audience into a mesmerizing existential dream. His full-length opera Under himlen (‘Under the Sky’) was staged at the Royal Danish Opera in 2004, four years after his pointillist piano concerto La notte (2008) was first performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Rolf Hind.

L’isola della Città (‘The Island in the City’), for huge orchestra and piano trio, is full of Sørensen hallmarks. A Beethoven fugue drifts into the music like a ghost passing a window, while the entire wind section is asked to play secondary instruments (in this case, woodblocks). The work’s distilled textures reach a new height of wind-blown refinement in tandem with the composer’s own etched neo-classical counterpoint. The sense of latent orchestral power in the piece prompted Sørensen to begin work on a new symphony, Second Symphony (2019), to follow Symphony (1996).

Sørensen’s orchestral work Evening Land (2017) was written for the New York Philharmonic and subsequently performed throughout Japan by the Danish National Symphony Orchestra under Fabio Luisi. He has written for ensembles including the Bergen Philharmonic, Danish National Symphony, Munich Chamber and various BBC orchestras. In 2011, he was composer in residence at the Huddersfield Festival of Contemporary Music.

Sørensen has been Visiting Professor in Composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London and Professor in Composition at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen.

Andrew Mellor, 2021

Work(s)

" St. Matthew Passion "

Opera

2024 SELECTION

"Around 2014, it struck me: what I most wanted to compose was a St. Matthew Passion.

When you reach a certain age, you become aware, as a composer, that you will not be able to compose it all, that there is a limit. So, without telling anyone, possible commissioners, institutions, etc., I decided that everything I was going to compose from then on, was going to lead me to a St. Matthew Passion.

Obviously, that is not exactly how things happened. In the meantime, I composed many works that have nothing to do with a St. Matthew Passion; but in between my “main works”, there are a few smaller ones for choir, that I said yes to, because I could see them as steppingstones toward my goal.

Through these works – through these years – shape and moods for my Passion gradually took form, until I had enough steppingstones to announce I wanted to compose a Passion, that led to a co-commission between Oslo International Church Music Festival and the Danish National Symphony Orchestra. The world premiere was planned for 22. March 2020, but due to the pandemic, the world premiere will now be 12. March 2021.

In 2018, I was finally ready, having enough fragments to start the final work of my Passion, and I contacted Jakob Holtze and asked him to create a text for the work, based on many ‘hurdles’, wishes and fragments. Holtze had previously worked with my good friend and colleague, sadly now deceased, Sven-David Sandstrøm, and created the libretto for his St. John Passion.

The idea for my Passion was a journey, a sort of crucifixion. A journey in the mist – in and out of the light. A journey towards crucifixion, but even more a journey towards resurrection. I felt my own faith, a faith in resurrection, rather than death and crucifixion.

In the music – and in my choice of texts – lies a love passion. Not only Christ’s love declaration to all humankind, through crucifixion and resurrection, but also the simple and beautiful love. The passion for the people we love. The passion one feels for the one we love.

I had – as I mentioned – a feeling of journeying towards the Cross – travelling in and out of the mist. A feeling of looking to the sides, out far to see and read fragments of texts – like graffiti on buildings, house walls. Texts that would remind the wanderer of the situation – life, memories. Almost as when we listen to pop-song lyrics, that are about us, whilst in the middle of our passions – about falling in love, grief.

I also decided, together with Jakob Holtze – that the text should be in English with a few Latin passages (Crucifixus, Miserere, etc.), I had in fact already started looking for English texts with the word ‘mist’ during my steppingstones. I also decided that I didn’t want recitativi, like in Bach’s Passion when Matthew is present. In my Passion I have texts by Matthew, but I have primarily chosen texts by six poets, three women: Södergran, Akhmatova and Dickinson, and three Danish men: Frank Jæger, Ole Sarvig and especially the luminous (and my friend) Søren Ulrik Thomsen.

Based on my wishes, Holtze created exactly the text I was hoping for. Ten movements – from ‘In Veils of Mist’ – where we walk in the mist, to ‘Betania’, ‘Psalm’, ‘Wild Nights’, ‘Crucifixus’, ‘Lament’, ‘Tenebrae, ‘Magdalena’, ‘The Shore Againg’ – a circular journey with memories of the coast, the dark, love and crucifixion – towards ‘Into the mist’, where the journey again disappears with these final words by Søren Ulrik Thomsen: “...the sound of my footsteps goes on, into the mist’.

It is clear, when one composes a St. Matthew Passion, that one is working toward the unachievable. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion is maybe the greatest work of art in any genre ever to be created in our culture.

There are certainly shadows of Bach in this work, but only one hidden quote. When they sing “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”, Bach’s recitativo melody lies beneath my own."

- Bent Sørensen

" Second Symphony (2020) "

Pour orchestre

Ed. Wilhelm Hansen

SELECTION 2021

This is not a ’Symphony no. 2’. It is a Second Symphony.

For several rather inexplicable reasons it is important to me not “just” to number the symphonies in order to emphasize the genre. Titles, more importantly than genres, are part of my dreams – the dreams that become music. And Second Symphony is definitely both a title and part of a dream.

I thought exactly the same when I composed (and now I almost wrote: "the first") Symphony in 1996.

Second Symphony is in four movements. The first movement opens with a scream. The subsequent parts of the movement form a unified but complex whole, where traces from the coming movements turn up – constantly in interaction with the scream and its echoes.

 

The second movement is slow and rather melodious. It was actually performed in a “trailer version” – shortened and minimized in December 2018 in the Danish TV programme Deadline.

The third movement is a scherzo – teeming, rhythmic, with almost physical soft and violent meetings, like acts of love between the different layers of music.

The last movement is a farewell song – a goodbye. A musical ship is approaching only to disappear again. Where I perceive the preceding movements as highly contemporary, there is a touch of the past in this last movement – my past. I quote my fourth string quartet Schreie und Melancholie, and in this movement I was also influenced by the fact that my mother passed away during the composition of this piece. Maybe this is my farewell that I write in music.

Bent Sørensen

" L'isola della città "

For violin, cello, piano and orchestra

Wilhelm Hansen

SÉLECTION 2017

Three soloists gather into one trio, which then becomes one compound soloist. A chamber ensemble surrounded by an orchestra – an island in the middle of the city.

The Triple Concerto is in five movements that are linked together and played without intermissions. Three short movements – a prelude, an intermezzo and a farewell – position themselves around in between the diverse second movement, which is initiated by something as strange – for me – as a piano fugue, and the impetuous and scherzo-like fourth movement. In all movements the island tries to escape from the city’s shadows – the trio seeks to escape the orchestra. In the fifth movement the trio’s yearning to get away from the orchestra is obvious as it silently and introverted glides away and out of the orchestra’s noisy shadows.

L’Isola della Cittá – The Island in the City is written for Trio con Brio and commissioned by The Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Trondheim Chamber Music Festival.