Saturnus - Bent Lorentzen

Saturnus (or Saturn) is from a suite of seven piece for organ titled "The Planets" by the modern Danish composer Bent Lorentzen. And just to be clear it's not a setting of Holst's planets, this is an entirely new one. It's also not on the planets as we know them. The piece in order are as follows:

Sol (Sun)
Luna (Moon)
Mars
Mercurius (Mercury)
Jupiter
Venus
Saturnus (Saturn)

In the cover page Lorentzen says that the pieces may be played as a suite (which takes about an hour) or performed separately. He also gives an explanation on why he used the Sun and the Moon as planets and didn't use others.

"It may seem strange that the Sun and the Moon are included here with the planets proper (and Pluto and Neptune are not), but the explanation is straightforward: my notion of the planets is based not upon present day astronomical science and knowledge, but rather on ancient conceptions of the firmament: the Earth being the centre of the Universe and the known "planets" of medieval astronomy orbiting the Earth.
The sequence of the titles reflects the progression of the days of the week." - Bent Lorentzen



Being that I've only played Saturnus that is the one I'll blog about. It's broken into three primary segments.

It's amazing what Lorentzen does with this piece, it truly sounds like Saturn. I don't know how, but it does. The piece starts out in 7/8 so it gives it that odd rhythm and right off the bat he gives us 9 large tone-cluster chords. Then that suddenly stops and we have this celestial sounding rhythm in the pedal. There is no registration marked, but on the recording and when I played it I use an 8' trumpet stop if I remember correctly. The lefthand meanwhile is holding down long sustained chords and the right hand throws in little chromatic passages here and there. It makes a wonderful effect.

(I apologize, the score is too big for my scanner and I had to cut the end off)

The second section is in 7/16, 13/16, 2/4, 7/8, and 4/4 rhythm. The right hand has a bouncy 6th and three 8th notes while the left hand has long sustained pitches. There's no pedal in this section. I think this was actually the hardest part of the piece for me when I learned it. Just trying to maintain and equal rhythm was a pain.

The third section and climax of the piece is the most fun to play. The hands play alternating fff chords on the manuals and the pedal has the sustained melody notes now from the left hand on the previous page. Again the tricky part is the rhythm again. This continues until the end when he writes out long sustained dissonant chords that end on a wonderfully dissonant chord that sums up the whole piece perfectly.

There is a complete recording of The Planets by the organist Jens E. Christiansen (to whom the piece was dedicated). I'll put a link below.


Amazon CD


There used to be a YouTube channel with recordings of all the Planets, but I can't seem to find it anymore. Maybe it has been taken down, but if someone finds it I will post it. I recommend listening to all of them. Since I can't find another though, I'll post a recording of me playing Saturnus last year.

You can get some of the scores I think from sheetmusicplus.com, but I know that musicroom.com has all of them. Warning though! Some of them are ridiculously hard, while others, like Saturnus, are on the more mild side. And unfortunately, they don't come as a set and you must buy each one individually. 

Scores for The Planets

I hope you enjoy these pieces!

Yours in Music,
Jim