Wednesday, November 29, 2017

Bent Sørensen

This year's winner of the big prize in composition, the Grawemeyer Award, is Danish composer Bent Sørensen. One of his best-known pieces is his violin concerto titled Sterbende Gärten:


He is visiting professor of composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London. The piece for which he was awarded the prize is L'Isola della Citta a triple concerto. Here are the first two movements:


That is music that, on first hearing, sounds as if it could stand a great deal more hearings! Tonal with a lot of microtonal inflections might be one way of describing it.

2 comments:

Craig said...

He seems a decent choice. I have one disc of his choral music (paired with Ockeghem!), which I like pretty well. Of course, it's tough to be paired with Ockeghem and still shine.

Bryan Townsend said...

That is a pretty unusual pairing!