Bent Sørensen

Prominent composer Bent Sørensen crafts contemporary scores that evoke echoes of earlier eras. International performers have turned to his catalog with growing frequency since the turn of the millennium.

He entered the world in Borup, outside Copenhagen, on July 18, 1958. From 1983 to 1987 he enrolled at the Royal Danish Conservatory of Music in the capital, where Ib Nørholm guided his studies; he later continued under the same teacher at the Royal Academy of Music and received his diploma in 1991. While still a student and in the years immediately afterward, he attracted notice with pieces such as the 1982 solo-clarinet work Troll-Spild (“Troll-Playing”) and four string quartets bearing evocative titles—Alman (1984), Adieu (1986), Angels’ Music (1988), and Schrie und Melancholie (1994). A decisive advance arrived with the 1993 violin concerto Sterbende Gärten (“Dying Gardens”), which the Danish National Radio Symphony Orchestra and conductor Leif Segerstam recorded; the score received the Nordic Council Music Prize in 1996.

Sørensen employs familiar tonal language yet subjects it to deliberate distortions, among them microtonal haze and abrupt collisions with atonal textures. His opera Under himlen (“Under the Sky”) reached the stage at Copenhagen’s Royal Opera House in 2004. Pianist Leif Ove Andsnes included two Sørensen compositions, both written expressly for him, on the 2009 album Shadows of Silence. In 2018 the triple concerto L’isola della Città earned the Grawemeyer Award from the University of Louisville in Kentucky. The Norwegian Soloists’ Choir recorded his St. Matthew Passion for the BIS label in 2023, at which point roughly sixty-five of his works had already appeared on disc. Since 2003 Sørensen has held a professorship in composition at the Royal Danish Conservatory of Music.