I have loved the Danish String Quartet ever since I first started listening to them, and I’ve already written about them once or twice in The Threepenny Review, as well as many times on this blog. I have no trouble remembering, between one concert and the next, how endearing these four guys are. And I never forget about their great musicianship, because I listen to their albums (particularly the recent Prism series) frequently and happily. But what always surprises me anew, whenever I attend one of their live shows, is how intense the bond is between them and their audience. I am apparently not the only one who loves them, and that becomes patently obvious every time.
Last night’s performance at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall was a typically wonderful example. On this occasion, and in fact for this whole tour of their fourth Doppelgänger concert, they were joined by the excellent Finnish cellis Johannes Rostamo, who fit right in, as if he had been playing with them forever. They needed the extra cello because, for this version of the multi-year Doppelgänger project (in which they commission living composers to write responses to a work of Schubert’s), they were playing both Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major and Thomas Adès’s tribute to it, a 2024 work which he titled Wreath for Franz Schubert. Bravely, they played the Schubert first and the Adès after the intermission. (Anyone else would have done it in the other order, so as to end with the crowd-pleaser, but the Danes wanted us to appreciate the explicit connection Adès had forged, which we could only do by hearing the Schubert Adagio first.) And then they concluded with two “songs”—one on the program, one as an encore—that they had adapted for string quintet. The first was another piece by Schubert, “Die Nebensonnen” from Winterreise; the second was by Carl Nielsen, a Danish composer whose work often supplies their encores.
Aside from the programming itself, what was typically DSQ was the friendly, relaxed, companionable way they spoke to the audience at various points during the concert. To begin with, the violist Asbbjørn Nørgaard picked up a microphone that was lying around the stage and welcomed us all to Schubert’s String Quartet. He managed to describe it as a “huge” piece of music in a way that would have appealed to both veteran chamber-music attenders and complete novices, and though I doubt there were any complete novices in this audience, it was definitely a different kind of crowd from the usual Zankel/Carnegie regulars. For one thing, the age level seemed lower; for another, there were a lot of warm, relaxed chuckles in response to Nørgaard’s comments; and at the intermission, conversations among the small groups seemed much livelier than usual. It could be that a lot of these audience members already knew each other (I knew two or three people myself, aside from the one I brought along). But it could also be that this particular performance of the Schubert Quintet was so noteworthy, so stimulating, that people simply couldn’t stop talking about it.
It’s hard to pinpoint what the DSQ did to make that piece their own, but it was audible to everyone who had ever heard it played before. They slowed it down a bit, taking nearly a full hour rather than the usual 48 minutes, and they created a number of dramatic pauses, sometimes within short passages. Their dynamic range, from near-silent pianissimo to full-hearted fortissimo, was notable, and sometimes practically instantaneous. (It was also totally suited to the musical work, as their little discernments and reinventions always are.) Their delight in the danceable rhythms, especially in the final Allegretto movement, was palpable. And they were so united in their playing that at times the five of them felt like a single organism designed for the production of music. I especially loved the way the two violinists, Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen and Fredrik Øland, turned their heads toward each other when playing certain repeated chords, as if to say: “Everyone else tries to jazz these bars up rhythmically and make them seem syncopated, but we know they are supposed to be Amishly plain in their repetition, and that’s how we’re going to do it.”
I’m still not sure what I thought of the Thomas Adès piece, but I loved Frederik Øland’s introduction to it. Like Nørgaard, he spoke to the expert and the newcomer alike, commenting that we maybe already knew how difficult Adès’s work could be, and that they themselves, waiting for the commission to arrive in the mail, were “excited but also a bit scared.” He charmingly took us through the things Adès had told them about how the piece was constructed, and he named each player in the group (by first name, as if we were all good friends, which is how we felt by now) when he described how their seemingly simple parts were interrelated. He described the piece as “meditative,” and that’s exactly what it was: a series of similar though never identical measures that had a subtle start and an even more subtle, though definite, finish.
The encore was introduced by Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen, and like the other two, he thanked us for welcoming the DSQ to Carnegie Hall—as if it were our doing, somehow, that they had been invited back. He promised they would return with the Doppelgänger I concert next year: “We owe you a concert,” he explained, describing how the pandemic had canceled their first try. He also said what a gift it had been playing with Johannes, and we all gave the blushing cellist an extra round of applause. And then he led into the Nielsen encore by noting that although “Schubert was the king of song, we have a Danish composer who was not too shabby.” The familiar tone, the idiomatic yet slightly accent-tinged English, the whole lovely way in which these guys sought to bring us into their circle, was a joy to behold—not because they needed such speech to enhance their already great performances, but because it was an especially generous, pleasure-giving thing to do.
I have seen them communicate with the audience like this in every concert of theirs I’ve ever attended, but I’ve only been to their American shows. Next month I’ll get to hear them at the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin, and I’m wondering what that will be like. Will they speak in German, or will they assume that Berlin’s classical music audience understands English? And will they be able to create the same sense of warm envelopment that their fans in America so clearly feel? I am very curious to find out.