Bent Sørensen: Concertos

Album review

Sometimes, the reputation of a performer can be a powerful factor in unearthing a previously-unknown composer. This is the case with this monographic album dedicated to works by Danish composer Bent Sørensen (born 1958), written specially for three Nordic musicians: pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, clarinettist Martin Fröst and trumpeter Tine Thing Helseth. Bent Sørensen's deeply nostalgic music is listened to as one might look at a painting that has been aged by time, like those yellowed photos that one takes out from their cardboard box on a rainy day. It proceeds through reminiscence, with flushes of tonality and glissandos that blur the harmony, like a dream gradually disappearing from one's waking memory.

With its five-movement structure, the Second Piano Concerto, La Mattina, written between 2007 and 2009, is based on the memory of an after-concert in a bar during which Leif Ove Andsnes had played a Choral by Bach transcribed by Busoni. Sørensen extends this magical moment throughout this score, which stretches towards the metaphysical from its classical bases, with instrumentation identical to Mozart's Concerto No. 17 . The result is unsettling and powerfully mesmerising.
Serinidad, for clarinet and orchestra, dates from 2011. Throughout its composition, the writer was obsessed with the image of a clarinet hovering like a bird trying to escape from the orchestra and concert hall, as if to leave its nest. Here, melancholy joins a modern romanticism in which the voice of the soloist intervenes in a kind of sung murmur. The Trumpet Concerto (2012-2013) takes up the classical composition style of the works of Haydn and Hummel but with a modern sound. The music is born out of the rubbing of hands and sandpaper, creating a soundscape into which the trumpet enters, as one enters a forest with its mysteries and dark corners.
Bent Sørensen's music, constantly oscillating between consciousness and unconsciousness, is a fascinating world; a perpetual source of dream and wonder. © François Hudry/Qobuz