Bent Sørensen – Angels Music (1988)

This string quartet is one of my friend Carolyn’s favorite pieces.  She played me part of it last year, and I found it fascinating.  Sørensen sets up a texture of high, fast, skittering figurations, all pianissimo harmonics and overtone glissandi and tremolos and slides to and from sul ponticello, like dust motes illuminated in a shaft of light.  Then he slowly allows other things to creep into the texture:  high sustained pitches in the cello that eventually start to form melodies, and also major thirds in various guises — as sudden attacks, as staccato repeated double-stops, as quiet glissandi.  The sound world is a bit like Saariaho, but the worldview that the music suggests is closer to Sciarrino or Gérard Pesson — one in which the past is only accessible through a veil of memory.

Listening to the whole piece now, though, I’m not sure what to think.  Sørensen does a great job of finding things in the cobwebs:  a bit of Romantic string quartet writing stretched and distorted and draped over an ill-fitting frame, a strange repetitive dance in violent double-stops and mixed meters that reminds me a bit of Gorecki’s early Sonata for Two Violins (1957).  But after a while I start finding all this subtlety strangely cloying.  I find myself wanting something to crash through the texture rather than sneaking in and out, to flash bright colors in my eyes rather than flickering in the periphery of my vision.  Even Sciarrino and Pesson, for all their love of whispery, almost inaudible sounds, will sometimes let loose with a pounding cluster chord or shocking percussive attack.  Maybe I’m in the wrong mood, and if I listened to the piece next week I’d fall in love with it.  But maybe my taste just isn’t quiet enough.