Bent Sørensen

The Danish composer Bent Sørensen was born in 1958, and the compelling depiction of organic decay and fragmentation in his music, combined with a beguiling melodic profile and haunting echoes of the past, have gained him a major international reputation. The 1993 violin concerto, Sterbende Gärten (Decaying Garden), is a key early piece, its striated orchestral textures and angular writing for the solo instrument evoking a jagged, dreamlike musical landscape. The experience of evanescence is examined further in Sørensen’s award-winning L’isola della Città (The Island in the City), a 2015 piece for violin, cello, piano, and orchestra. Here the soloists interact together as an intimate, indissoluble unit, while the outside world glides clamorously, sometimes disturbingly by. The possibility of human love abiding amid chaos and desolation animates Sørensen’s St. Matthew Passion (2019), where through the bleakness and anguish of the Crucifixion story a growing ray of spiritual luminosity is discernible.