Patior – to suffer: that’s the verb at the root of any Passion. Bach’s settings put suffering front and centre, carved out in jagged choral counterpoint for the crowds in the St John, weeping through the arias of the St Matthew. For many years Danish composer Bent Sørensen was determined to write his own Passion – one that puts love, rather than suffering, at its core: ‘a journey towards Crucifixion, but even more a journey towards Resurrection’.

Premiered in 2021 and now recorded for the first time by Grete Pedersen, Ensemble Allegria and The Norwegian Soloists’ Choir, it’s an extraordinary statement that arrives late in a singular career. All Sørensen’s sound experiments at the brink of silence, his play with darkness and light, his blurring of textural edges come into (or, perhaps, out of) focus in this large-scale work for choir, soloists and orchestra that invites the listener on a journey through the mist.

While fragments of St Matthew’s Gospel and the traditional Passion narrative do remain, they are cut up into tiny scraps and restitched together with words from six other poets including Anna Akhmatova, Emily Dickinson and Søren Ulrik Thomsen. The effect is at once coherent and disjointed. Like ceramicists in Japanese kintsugi who repair broken bowls with gold, drawing the eye to the cracks, celebrating their hazard-lines and chance patterns, so Sørensen creates a strange and beautiful order. It helps that in The Norwegian Soloists’ Choir he has a group perfectly designed for a piece in which solo voices surface rather than stand apart, always part of a continuous texture.

We open in mist, musical lines slipping and sliding over one another, bells chiming distantly. Melodies surge and build (Gramophone critic Andrew Mellor’s description of Sørensen’s music as ‘crammed with as much beauty as tastefully possible’ holds truer than ever) but always obscured or occluded. The violin stirs briefly, a sort of ghost-cousin to Bach’s D minor Chaconne, at the start of ‘Betania’; rapturous, Straussian strings are peremptorily pulled up short by trumpets in ‘Psalm’; a familiar melody resurfaces, soothing the orchestra in ‘Tenebræ’. Balance and counterbalance are set aside in the central setting of Dickinson’s ‘Wild Nights’, strings fizzing, shuddering with intensity, a swarm of sounds shooting and coalescing. It’s spiritual and sensual – at once an act of transgression and redemption.

Pedersen holds all these shards in place, creating both clear architecture in her pacing and balance of instruments and voices (impeccably captured here by producer Jens Braun) and space within that structure for expressive detail and, of course, the all-important silences. It’s a virtuoso account of a piece that takes the spirit of Bach and says something quite new.