“Bent Sorensen, a Danish composer known for trembling, glistening works that have drawn comparisons to the paintings of Georges Seurat, has won the 2018 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition for his triple concerto ‘L’Isola della Città,’ ” writes Zachary Woolfe in Tuesday’s (11/28) New York Times. “Presented by the University of Louisville in Kentucky, the Grawemeyer is one of contemporary music’s most prestigious prizes, and comes with a $100,000 award. In Mr. Sorensen, 59, it has gone to a creator of works of hushed drama, full of sliding, drooping, flickering motifs that conjure ghostly, nocturnal worlds … Written for the Danish ensemble Trio con Brio and the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, which gave its premiere last year, ‘L’Isola della Città’ (‘The Island in the City’) unfolds over nearly half an hour in five continuous movements.… Marc Satterwhite, the award’s director, said, … ‘On the whole it is one of the gentler, more introspective winners of this award.’ The New York Philharmonic will give the premiere of Mr. Sorensen’s ‘Evening Land’ on Thursday…. Past winners of the Grawemeyer Award include Esa-Pekka Salonen, Unsuk Chin, Kaija Saariaho, Pierre Boulez, Thomas Adès, Tan Dun, John Adams … Gyorgy Ligeti [and] Andrew Norman.”
Posted November 29, 2017
