Schattenlinie (2005–10)

In Schaum: Dolcissimo

Kirschgarten: Luminoso

Wigenlied: Andantino

“It reminds me of something I’ve never heard.” Arne Nordheim’s    comment on the work of his younger colleague Bent Sørensen is both witty and truthful since the music itself is presented as a paradox. Or, as another commentator has put it, “Sørensen manages to create the perception that musical events are taking place which never entirely come into focus”. In that respect Schattenlinie (Shadow-Line) which the Danish composer wrote over a period of five years, one movement per year, for Leif Ove Andsnes and the Risør Festival, is entirely characteristic.

As the Schattenlinie title suggests – and as the movement headings confirm, whatever they mean exactly – there is a strong visual element in Sørensen’s music, or at least a sensitivity to atmosphere. It could even be described as painterly as long as that is not taken to imply thick patches of oil paint or acrylic: it is more a matter of the thinnest watercolours applied with the finest of brushes. Mondnacht (Moonlit Night), for example, is a study in very quiet dynamics confined largely to the area between mp and ppp or ppp possibile. A few notes are marked forte here and there but the general tendency, with the piano part limited throughout to the top half of the keyboard and the clarinet and viola poised on sustained lines at first, is to bright, tanslucent textures. The increased melodic and rhythmic activity of the middle section continues in the closing section untiil it accelerates towards the end and dies out on the piano.

Wasserflussen (Streams of Water) is, apart from unpredictable stabs of ff, scarcely louder than the preceding movement. Designed as a scherzo, however, it is quicker in tempo and, thanks not least to the ostinato material on clarinet and viola, much more emphatically rhythmic, particularly at the central point where the piano takes up the same figuration. In Schaum (In Foam) calls for spectral colouring from clarinet and viola, which are frequently instructed to play without vibrato, although a special feature is made of the latter instrument’s glissandos and tremolandos until the clarinet joins it in an accelerating trill at the end of the middle section. Kirschgarten (Cherry Orchard) contrasts viola harmonics with a quiet drumming on the piano and a firmer melodic line on the clarinet. The drumming recedes on a ritardando and is briefly taken up again in the closing section. As its title, Wiegenlied (Cradle Song) suggests, the last movement is more melodious, and in its consistent 6/8 metre, more regularly rhythmic than the first four movements. Here too dynamics are confined within the quiet extremes, although there is scope for expressive colouring in the reminiscent piano. postlude.