Sometimes I think I organize my geographical existence around the concert schedule of the Danish String Quartet. This is not actually true. What is true is that I once flew from California to New York to catch their Beethoven cycle at Alice Tully Hall—and boy, was that worth it. But for the most part I allow our overlaps to occur naturally. I have yet to cross the Atlantic just to hear them play, though I am always happy when my semi-annual Berlin trips coincide with their appearances at the Pierre Boulez Saal, as happened last spring. And similarly, I am glad when I get to hear them during twice in a single season, in both Berkeley and Manhattan—these being the two places I inhabit for part of each year, both of which the Danes seem to visit with some regularity.
This year I caught them at Cal Performances on February 2 and then, about two months later, at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall, so I suppose I have had my fair share. But I am already fretting about the fact that I will miss their summer concerts in Denmark, including the premiere of their new Shostakovich piece, I press your hand warmly, which is based partly on Shostakovich’s letters and partly on his string quartets. Since I have yet to attend any of their Danish concerts, this should not really bother me. But it does, perhaps because I feel so personally (if unreasonably) possessive about Shostakovich.
To date, I have managed to hear them play two of Shostakovich’s fifteen quartets—the Seventh, which is his shortest, and the Fifteenth, which may be his most difficult to pull off—and each performance persuaded me of their deep affinity for this composer’s work. That is somewhat surprising, because the DSQ are in general a sunny, friendly, companionable group, interested in the various kinds of pleasure offered by music, whereas DSCH can often be quite moody and forbidding. But that difference in temperament does not prevent these musicians from getting to the heart of Shostakovich’s work. When they played the somber, relentlessly slow Fifteenth Quartet at Cal Performances in February, they introduced it by pointing out that the composer was very ill when he wrote it, and warning us that “not all music is meant to be enjoyed.” If I did, perversely, enjoy it, it was partly by remembering Shostakovich’s own instructions to his favorite players about how they should perform the first movement: “Play it so that flies drop dead in mid-air, and the audience starts leaving the hall from sheer boredom.” None of us in Hertz Hall were even faintly tempted to leave—I could sense that all my fellow audience members were as gripped and entranced as I was—but we nonetheless appreciated the brief respite that followed. That final bit of the program, three Irish folk melodies drawn from the DSQ’s terrific Keel Road album, got introduced with the phrase, “Now you can enjoy the music again.”
Last Friday’s performance at Zankel Hall was also a mixture of sorts, though for different reasons. A payback for a missed concert during the pandemic, it was actually the first of the Danish String Quartet’s “Doppelgänger” series, the second, third, and fourth of which had already been performed at Carnegie. For each of these concerts, they commissioned a modern composer to write a new piece that responded in some way to one of Schubert’s late works for strings. I had heard and appreciated the Thomas Adès response, paired with Schubert’s String Quintet, during their last Zankel appearance; this time I heard and appreciated Bent Sørensen’s composition, inspired by the last of Schubert’s string quartets. Appreciation is not the same as enjoyment, however, and I wondered, frankly, if it could ever be a fair contest between Schubert and someone else. Certainly I felt we had all earned our money’s worth by the time of the intermission, with the String Quartet in G Major played as perfectly as it could ever be played. So the agitated, thrumming Sørensen piece—along with the program’s final flourish, an adaptation of Schubert’s “Doppelgänger” song for string quartet—felt like gravy, or icing, or whatever you get when you don’t actually need anything more. But like gravy or icing, it was a plus, because it is always a plus to hear the Danes play.
They are not entirely Danish, by the way—the cellist is a Norwegian—and this time the they were even more internationally varied than usual. One of the two violinists, Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen (no relation, as far as I know, to Bent), was back home on parental leave and had been temporarily replaced by the Los Angeles–based violinist Yura Lee. Introducing us to Rune’s “doppelgänger” in his brief, graceful talk before the performance, the violist Asbjørn Nørgaard took a moment to point out that Yura was from Korea and California, the cellist was from Norway, the rest of them were from Denmark, and “it is always good when people from different countries can join together to make something.” Coming on the heels of the horrific tariff announcements and all the other hateful, isolating decisions of the past seventy days, this quiet statement seemed to open the floodgates, causing the pent-up Zankel audience to burst into loud, prolonged applause. I applauded myself, and as I clapped, I felt tears starting to my eyes—a sign not only of how sad I am about what is happening to America, but also of how grateful I am to the Danes for coming to our intermittent rescue.