Those who know the music of Bent Sorensen (b.1958) from Da Capo’s disc of his prize-winning Violin Concerto and the cantata The Echoing Garden (6/96), will need no persuasion to explore this new disc, even if only one of the six pieces, Birds and Bells (1995), is on an equivalent scale. That said, the eerie The Deserted Churchyards (1990), can act as a prelude to the intense Funeral Procession (1989), while the opening ‘mini-viola concerto’ The Lady and the Lark (with the uncredited Marek Konstantynowicz an adroit soloist) harks back to the concluding The Lady of Shalott (1987), given here in its 1993 string quartet garb.
Birds and Bells is a chamber trombone concerto, one of several recent pieces Sorensen pieces for the instrument including the unaccompanied The Bells of Vineta (1990) and the quintet (with strings) The Wings of Night. Sorensen has remarked that Birds and Bells is ‘not a “roaring” concerto but rather a “pianissimo”’ one; if not as sedate as that suggests one can hear what he means, while it still affords Lindberg plenty of opportunity for his particular brand of electric music-making. So does The Bells of Vineta, with its atmospheric evocation of a sunken city that rises to the surface once every century.
The bulk of the performances are undertaken by the excellent Cikada Ensemble, dedicatees of The Lady and the Lark, who sound thoroughly at home with Sorensen’s idiom. ECM’s exemplary sound makes audible the music’s every whisper and shimmer (and some hefty breathing by Lindberg). Well worth investigating. '