Niels Viggo
Bentzon was phenomenally productive across his eighty one
years. He wrote more than 650 works of which there are
more than thirty symphonies and some thirty piano sonatas
(see
biography
of Bentzon and review of all the piano music).
Clearly this is going to be a long series!
The three
movement
Second Sonata is a grand affair with gestures
that at one moment recall the most ambitiously magniloquent
Rachmaninov and at others suggest an attempt at a modern
Waldstein sonata.
The
Fourth is a six movement sonata with three
Largos.
Classical grandeur has been left behind. Instead the statements
are suggestive and fragmented. The
Largos are deployed
1, 3 and 6. The first two drip their statements steadily
while the valedictory one has an Olympian serenity. The first
allegro -
there are two (2 and 5) - is edgy and angular with a hint
or two of Shostakovich's shrapnel in the coruscations. The
second
allegro tumbles along in Beethovenian grandeur
and the sort of writing that unnervingly recalls de Falla's
Nights
in the Gardens of Spain. The
andante con moto comes
fourth in the sequence. It has the mien of a hesitant Pierrot
landscape amble. The
Seventh Sonata, across its four
movements is that much more fractured. Great rearing up gestures,
angularity, dissonant philosophical traversals, suggestions,
Beethovenian trudgings and explosive asides: these all play
their way through this brief four movement sonata. Fascinating
stuff.
Henrik
Friis provides the liner-notes which tend toward technicality.
That said most of the essential information is provided apart
from details of premieres.
The sound
is in the best Dacapo tradition - muscular and clear.
It is perhaps
typical of Dacapo's seriousness of purpose and abnegation
of commercial values that nowhere do they mention the number
and details of the first CD in this steadily developing Bentzon
Edition. Anyone tempted to give us an
intégrale of
the symphonies and piano concertos?
Rob Barnett
Christina
Bjørkøe (piano) 
