Beethoven and the Danes

All concert attendance is a betting game, but some bets are riskier than others. Earlier this month, I bet on something I thought would surely pay off: I traveled to New York from California just to hear the Danish String Quartet play all sixteen Beethoven quartets in an eleven-day cycle presented by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Yet even I, who am already on record praising these musicians to the skies, could not have predicted how marvelous the experience would be.

For one thing, they decided to play the quartets in essentially chronological order, which is not how the Beethoven cycle is usually played. Normally in such concerts (and in my favorite recordings as well) we get a mixture of early, middle, and late in each two-hour chunk. But the four members of the Danish String Quartet—Fredrick Øland and Rune Tongsgaard Sørensen on violin, Asbjorn Norgaard on viola, and Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin (the sole Norwegian) on cello—decided instead to display Beethoven’s development over time. So we got two initial concerts featuring the six lively quartets of Opus 18, which you might characterize as Beethoven’s Haydn period, though even at this early stage he was increasingly exhibiting moments of weirdness and idiosyncratic inventiveness. The third concert presented the three terrific Razumovsky quartets, which deserved a whole evening to themselves (especially given the Danes’ affinity for folk-derived classical music). The fourth bridged middle and late by covering Op. 74 (“Harp”), the rarely heard and rather grim Op. 95 (“Serioso”), and then my person favorite in the whole batch, Op. 127, which marks the start of Beethoven’s final, mature sensibility. And then there were two unbelievably great concerts that each treated just two of the late quartets: one combining Op. 132 and Op. 130 (the latter with the Grosse Fugue occupying its original position as the final movement), and the other starting with the deeply moving Op. 131 and ending with the oddly chipper Op. 135.

I have listened to all of these quartets many times in the privacy of my own house, and I have also heard them played live many times, including in a full cycle. But I have never before felt I was mainlining the music, getting it infused directly into me by performers who had fully thought about it, taken in its possibilities, and mastered it together. The variations from what I was familiar with were not extreme—a bit more dynamic range, perhaps; a few more sharply dramatic pauses; a greater sense both of group coherence and of soloist skill—but the overall effect was noticeably more thrilling than what I was used to.

And at each concert, the intensity grew and grew: not just in the music itself (though one could really feel the progression in this arrangement), but also in the audience’s reaction. I have been watching and listening to the Danish String Quartet for years, so I knew, in a way, what to expect. But for many of the audience members who were packing Alice Tully Hall on these occasions, the youthful, informally dressed, utterly fresh and musically intelligent Scandinavians came as a delightful surprise. Because one or the other of the musicians spoke from the stage before each of their encores (as they have a habit of doing in all of their concerts, sometimes even addressing us earlier on), we had the sense we were getting to know them personally—that is the atmosphere they always manage to create, on every stage, large and small, where I have ever seen them. The Alice Tully audience responded by becoming very quiet and very loud: very quiet during and before each piece of music, and raucous to the point of rock-band cheering when each quartet had finished. By the final two concerts, you could hear whoops of approval and witness massive standing ovations even at the intermissions. The audience, many of whom attended all six concerts, absolutely loved these guys, and the players responded in kind. At the end of the final concert—when, having wisely decided to forgo an encore and give the last word to Beethoven, they stood on the stage with their arms around each other’s shoulders and smiled back at us—the applause was so resounding, and so downright affectionate, that I wondered if the New Yorkers would ever allow the Danes to go home. Of course, we had to let them go in the end (one always does, alas, in live concerts), but the feeling of what they gave us will, I imagine, stick with us all forever.