Hans-Kristian Sorensen was born into a musical family. His conservatoire-trained mother played piano and trumpet, and she was keen for the young Hans-Kristian to learn the trumpet, too. She was, as he puts it, "a very forceful lady", and the fact that he was dead set against the trumpet wasn't likely to have figured in her decision making. In the end, it wasn't any resistance on his part that saved him, but his teeth. As a youngster, he had buck teeth, "sticking out by 13mm, quite a lot", and when he was brought to a trumpet teacher, the verdict was firm and final. "He said I could never play the trumpet. So they let me have a drum."
Percussion, he says, is something he always played. After all, you only need your hands to get started, and he was sent to a kindergarten where there were lots of percussion instruments for him to indulge his passion. He started taking lessons at the age of seven, and was soon playing in all kinds of rock'n'roll bands. The bands at school were "very boring" for him as a drummer. "I was not encouraged to go further. All the older guys were always pushing down the younger ones. So I started to play tuba, which I did for six years, while continuing to play percussion and take lessons. I also started to play piano, when I was eight, and I kept on doing that for 12 years. "I had different kinds of instruments to play on. I played bass guitar and guitar. When I was 13 I met the timpani player in the Norwegian Opera. He was very eager about me and encouraged me to take lessons on xylophone and vibraphone. Of course, I'd been playing for piano for five or six years, so it was very easy for me to go over to these melodic instruments. Things happened very fast. I started to play in big bands and jazz groups, started to listen to Weather Report and all those heroes. I did a lot of Latin music".
Classical music hardly featured at this time. "The first time I even played in a symphony orchestra, I was 19. I remember playing in Stravinsky's Firebird. I played the xylophone part, which has a glissando in it, very fast, over one octave. I didn't know what a glissando was, so I played all the notes individually. I practised it for a whole day, and turned up at the rehearsal. Nobody said a word, everyone was looking shocked. I thought that was how it was supposed to be." He can see the funny side of it now, learning as a scale something that should have been done with the wipe of a stick, but as a long-term indicator of how he would ultimately fit into the patterns of orchestral working, it was pretty accurate.
"Then I went to the conservatory in Oslo, and things just developed. Now I see that maybe I could have had more resistance, more friction in my development, because everything was always very easy for me. I got my first professional job, in the Trondheim Symphony Orchestra, after six months in the conservatory. I felt it all to be very natural, because I had been preparing myself. That was hard to swallow for my colleagues, many of whom were struggling a lot. I got to be principal percussionist in the Stavanger Symphony when I was 24, and then I was principal in the Bergen Philharmonic when I was 25, still very young and eager. I think that's the way it should be when you're young. You should stretch and go as far as you can."
But in Bergen he was the principal in a percussion section where he was actually the youngest player. Unfortunately, to his way of thinking, "The climate for collaborating was not there." After two years on what was obviously a steep and rather painful learning curve, he decided to quit. It was a decision which, he realised later, "was very lucky for me. I wanted to take more education, and in Europe there are age limits for entry to the higher classes in the conservatories. I didn't even know that when I stopped playing in the orchestra."
He spent a while at the Banff Centre in Canada, won a prize at the CIEM Competition in Geneva, and then got a place in the class of Silvio Gualda, with whom he spent two years studying solo repertoire and chamber music. Of course, his jobs with symphony orchestras hadn't kept him away from other interests. "I always played jazz, I always played all kinds of improvised music, Latin music, Afro-Cuban music." He sees all this experience as a wonderful preparation for the wide range of demands contemporary composers make of percussionists. Today, he concentrates on solo recitals, chamber music and improvised music, with occasional returns to the orchestra, where being a small cog in a mighty machine of great music still provides a very special thrill. It has been a long and very successful journey for someone whose only ambition when he was a student was "to be good enough to continue, to play jazz, and to work as a sub in a symphony orchestra. I wasn't really thinking about a career. I was just trying to control my playing, my nerves, give the public good music, discover all kinds of different music and continue to learn".
Percussion in the world of classical music really only began to emerge from the back of the orchestra around 1930, with the Percussion Concerto by Darius Milhaud and the still-remarkable all-percussion ensemble piece, Ionisation by Edgard Varese. The solo works that stand out for Sorensen are all much more recent than that: Stockhausen's Zyklus of 1959 - this, he feels, is where it all really began - and the two major percussion works by Xenakis, Psappha (1975) and Rebonds (1988), the latter of which he'll be playing in Bantry. One of the particular challenges of contemporary music is the extraordinary diversity of styles. In the area of string quartets, he points out, the Kronos and Arditti Quartets both have highly specialised but very different repertoires. "I can go and pick composers that compose very differently and give me different tasks when I work and when I practise and when I play the concerts. To make up a recital from all this kind of repertoire is most exciting. You can have all kinds of different colours, different energies.
"When the festival director, Francis Humphrys, wanted me to have a piece to open the festival (on Saturday, June 24th), I thought straight away of Maki Ishii's 13 Drums. It's ritualistic, very focused, only drums, very virtuosic. People can come into a concert from quarrelling with their wives, shouting at the kids, or watching TV. This is the sort of piece which can grab everyone immediately. It's based on the Japanese drumming tradition, and it will start the festival with a bang."
For the concert with pianist Joanna MacGregor (at midday on Tuesday 27th), the duo have chosen pieces with a theatrical element. The major work is Georges Aperghis's Quatre pieces febriles, which, as Sorensen describes them, manage to bring new dimensions to the word feverish. "They're very theatrical," he says, "although there's no text, no voices and no choreography". He's also going to do some solo, text-based pieces by Greek-born, French-resident Aperghis, whose sometimes extraordinary work is only rarely heard in Ireland.
His late-night solo concert (at 10.30pm on Wednesday 28th) includes Xenakis's Rebonds, two pieces by John Cage (A flower and The wonderful widow of eighteen springs), and works by Franco Donatoni (Omar) and Kevin Volans (She who sleeps with a small blanket). Sorensen is also appearing in chamber music (Schnittke's Hymns at 5pm on Saturday, July 1st) and as a conductor, with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra in a programme of Part, Vasks, MacMillan and Lutoslawski. His conversation is peppered with recurring descriptive extremes, the word "energy" topping the list on the positive side, "boring" topping the negative list. Energy, I suspect, is one quality which won't be in short supply at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival this summer.
The West Cork Chamber Music Festival runs in Bantry House and other venues in Bantry from Saturday, June 24th to Sunday, July 2nd. For further information and booking contact 027-52788 or e- mail westcorkmusic@eircom.net.
