Sørensen's St Matthew Passion

Danish composer Bent Sørensen, whose operatic collaboration with Jon Fosse Asle & Alida was premiered in Bergen last season, had long harboured a desire to write a musical setting of the Passion of Christ on Bach’s model. But while Sørensen’s St Matthew Passion took its lead from Bach it was also fundamentally different - focused not on suffering and death but on love and resurrection.

Five years after its first performance, Sørensen’s spiritual and sensual work gets its first Bergen performance. Using fragments of the Passion according to St Matthew as well as verse by poets including Emily Dickinson and Søren Ulrik Thomsen, Sørensen’s luminously beautiful score creates what Gramophone magazine described as ‘a strange and beautiful order’ while teetering on the edge of silence. Expect an intense, meditative and deeply beautiful journey through darkness and light in the atmospheric surroundings of Bergen Cathedral.