BENT SØRENSEN (b.1955): La Notte for Piano and Orchestra, 7 Sehnsüchte for Violin and Piano, The Masque of the Red Death for Piano.

Description: In Sørensen's uniquely individual idiom, any and all compositional devices may be used to the end of the greatest possible expressivity. The seven violin and piano 'Longings' exploit every kind of extended sound-production technique - percussive effects, unorthodox contact on the strings, vocalizations - in a cycle that seems to suggest intense yearning, with the violin at the outset communicating in breathless, Sciarrino-like whispers, increasingly emphatically answered by the piano as the pieces progress. Masque takes Poe's story as symbolic of natural decay; the piece feels like an inexorable organic process speeded up as in a time-lapse film. Hectic activity hints at the 'new complexity', though textures are more homogeneous than this usually suggests, with predominantly descending motifs punctuating the texture. After several shocking pauses and re-animations, the work ends in sepulchral shadow. The concerto employs similarly insistent piano activity, with pounding notes and chords defiantly standing their ground in the face of slithering gliding tones and magmatic floes of orchestral texture that threaten to overwhelm the soloist. This confrontational relationship in the first movement gives way to an ethereal dreamscape with eerie extended effects from the piano, and the second part continues in this way, with odd microtonal intonations in the orchestra and a wayward melodic thread from the soloist that ultimately leads to an extended, lyrical cadenza and a kind of ambiguous resolution. Rolf Hind (piano), David Alberman (violin), BBC Symphony Orchestra; Michael Schønwandt.