Niels Viggo Bentzon (1919-2000) may have been Denmark’s most prolific composer ever: his enormous output for piano includes at least 30 solo sonatas. Bentzon’s considerable piano virtuosity and facility for improvising most probably accounts for the tactile ease and fluidity characterizing the three relatively early works included on this disc. The Second Sonata’s outer movements are padded with long stretches of grey harmonic motion and wandering scales, although the central Adagio’s visionary lyrical breadth and touching melodic content are beautiful to behold. The Fourth’s unusual six-movement form alternates between three austere Largos, two rapidly-paced yet harmonically static Allegros, and an Andante con moto that is more suggestive of Shostakovich Preludes mashed together (is the recurring DSCH motive a coincidence?) than the “jazz ballad” to which the annotator refers.
Although the Seventh Sonata embraces a markedly more dissonant vocabulary (the DSCH motive is present again, but in the form of repeated notes), its immensely varied keyboard textures and unpredictable turns of events really hold your attention. Here pianist Christina Bjørkøe lets loose with her most incisive, dynamically charged playing. True, both pianist and repertoire would benefit from warmer, more detailed engineering, but then again, I don’t see any rival Bentzon Sonata cycle lurking on the horizon. Recommended to piano lovers attracted to off-center yet accessible 20th-century fare.
