Performers & composers

Bent Sørensen

Bent Sørensen was born in 1958 - and received his musical education by, amongst others, Per Nørgård and Ib Nørholm. For Bent Sørensen, it was the string quartet as medium that enabled the composer to find his way to a personal musical idiom, an idiom that refers to something that once existed but does not anymore. The composer plays on our understanding of time and our collective memory trail. One gets the feeling that one has heard his music before, only in another way and from another place. As an echo of something that once was real and present. The goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, is Sørensen’s guiding star. The composer searches in the past. A fragment of a well-known song appears, a melodic phrase sounds familiar, yet it is foreign all the same. The inner vision searches for fixed points in what was heard, and one experiences a longing for something lost. The veiling or concealment of the lost is vital to Sørensen. He wants floating atmospheres in which musical expressions can point in different directions. An expression of a too firm character would be destructive of the musical impenetrability and of the artist’s unquenchable longing to give in to the lyrical jump and irregular rhythm of consciousness.

Bent Sørensen undertakes measurings of the falling depths of life, and renders his findings in an extremely thoroughly prepared and finely cicelated music, which would never develope into something entirely different than intended. It endures and lives in hushed surfaces, and the inner life does not stand out until one gets close to the music. The inner life of the works consists of small swarming movements in a nervous gesticulation. Sliding movements in hectic and compressed textures constantly takes what is heard to the edge of chaos. The music threatens to lose its head. Melodies move downwards in a fall: An abundance of lines bordering on the chaotic, graphic playing with the lines of instruments, imperceptible transitions, sound clouds in common formations: A refined balancing act between the real and the unreal, and between ‘oversteered’ foreground and indistinct background. Occasionally, fragments of traditional music and musical phrases appear in the foreground of the sound image. This is image creating music, playing on feelings and evoking associations. Associations to decline. Associations to borderlines between culture and nature.

Bent Sørensen sees the beauty in decline, in that which is marked by the ravages of time. It has death and destruction as its general musical atmosphere, and it cannot say no to the enigmatic and incomprehensible. Musically, this happens through seeking trails in the olden times: The music builds upon our inherent feeling for major and minor. The composer plays on our consciousness of tradition, he uses triads, and he uses them practically all the time to boot. Sørensen’s music fluctuates, but it is the same basic project, the same artistic effects, which are constantly being refined. The swarmingly dynamic opposite the static. The hushed opposite the introverted, moderated ferocity. Distorted tonality, quarter tones, blurred thirds, polyphony with ambiguity as its goal.

The mental historical icons run true to form. Ruins, inscrutable melancholy, overgrown gardens. Fragments of the past are maintained. Bent Sørensen’s music contains something of the earlier times, still sounding in the present: Church bells, birds, wind-swept church yards, angels. Death. Bent Sørensen’s music is always about something, even though one cannot say exactly what. There are ardent lovers, sad processions on the way to the cemetery, mute women with upturned eyes of female saints, sallow nun’s habits, angel pictures, blurred images, outlines of the richness in detail of a time past, dark mould in the early spring. The aesthetics of decline. Music on the edge of silence.

Intermezzi (25')

Premiered 12. February 2004
In March, when the Royal Theatre premiered the composer Bent Sørensen’s and the dramatist Peter Asmussen’s opera Under the Sky, it was not only Bent Sørensen’s first opera on the large scale, but also his first work as a music dramatist at all. The challenge of composing an opera came from the general manager of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra/DR, Per Erik Veng, who had asked Asmussen in 1996 whether he would write the libretto for an opera and pick out a composer to work with on it. Asmussen was willing, and he pointed to Bent Sørensen as the composer. Bent Sørensen reacted positively to Per Erik Veng’s suggestion of an opera collaboration with Asmussen, and with the opera agreement settled, the Danish National Symphony Orchestra/DR was then offered an independent work. It is related to the opera, but sheds light on it from a different angle – Bent Sørensen himself compares it to a film ‘trailer’. The result is Intermezzi, a suite in five movements.

Intermezzi is expressly not just a garland of selected episodes from the opera, but an independent work built up in one long symmetrical sequence with instrumental passages in the middle of the first, third and fifth movements as well as the purely instrumental second and fourth movements, as the bearing pillars of the work. Fragments of the story of Ida and Molte (both mezzo-sopranos) are told, but they do not happen in the same order or with the same conclusion as in the opera. In this way Intermezzi becomes a comment on how not everything in the past is necessarily what it seems, or what one at first makes of it.

In the first movement Ida sings to Magius that she is carrying Molte’s child, while from afar Molte observes the idyllic world from the outside. The second movement is instrumental, while the third begins with Ida’s love aria, which merges into a great instrumental passage before the movement ends with Molte’s cynical remark that Ida is simply “a fairytale, a book one closes. After a brief instrumental fourth movement comes the fifth, where Molte laments his coldness and isolation amidst all the riches, and seduces Ida by urging her to liberate him with her warmth.
Danish National Symphony Orchestra