Bent Sørensen

La Notte' Piano Concerto

Score of the Danish Composer's Concerto for Piano and Orchestra written in 1996. Bent Sorensen writes:
'The title of this piano concerto came, as usual, very early to me, when my thoughts about the work had started to circulate, but before 'real' music was written down. I held on to the Italian title, even though its association with Vivaldi had no influence on my music, and even when German, French, English, and Danish titles covering almost the same content -'Nachtmusik', 'Nocturne', 'By Night', 'Om Natten', were just about to get the upper hand. The piano concerto has, then, in my opinion, something to do with night, but to describe this further is at least as difficult to me as it is to defend the final Italian title against those which were rejected. The Piano Concerto is in two movements. The first, swarming, is perhaps the mystery of the night, and the second perhaps the dreams of the night; with this, however, I have already given the concerto a more programmatic content than I can defend. Each movement ends with a cadenza and perhaps the last of those - the ending of the work that is - is inspired by a sequence from Bruce Chatwin's wonderful book 'The Viceroy of Ouidah': Or the Amazons howling. 'No, No, No. It was not the leopard that killed him. Not the buffalo that killed him. It was night. Night that killed him!'