{"id":1495,"date":"2025-04-07T09:46:02","date_gmt":"2025-04-07T16:46:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/?p=1495"},"modified":"2025-04-07T12:18:04","modified_gmt":"2025-04-07T19:18:04","slug":"a-welcome-visit-from-the-danes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/a-welcome-visit-from-the-danes\/","title":{"rendered":"A Welcome Visit from the Danes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Sometimes I think I organize my geographical existence around the concert schedule of the Danish String Quartet. This is not actually true. What is<\/em> true is that I once flew from California to New York to catch their Beethoven cycle at Alice Tully Hall\u2014and 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<\/a>, 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\u2014these being the two places I inhabit for part of each year, both of which the Danes seem to visit with some regularity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This year I caught them at Cal Performances<\/a> on February 2 and then, about two months later, at Carnegie\u2019s Zankel Hall<\/a>, 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<\/em>, which is based partly on Shostakovich\u2019s 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To date, I have managed to hear them play two of Shostakovich\u2019s fifteen quartets\u2014the Seventh, which is his shortest, and the Fifteenth, which may be his most difficult to pull off\u2014and each performance persuaded me of their deep affinity for this composer\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u201cnot all music is meant to be enjoyed.\u201d If I did, perversely, enjoy it, it was partly by remembering Shostakovich\u2019s own instructions to his favorite players about how they should perform the first movement: \u201cPlay it so that flies drop dead in mid-air, and the audience starts leaving the hall from sheer boredom.\u201d None of us in Hertz Hall were even faintly tempted to leave\u2014I could sense that all my fellow audience members were as gripped and entranced as I was\u2014but we nonetheless appreciated the brief respite that followed. That final bit of the program, three Irish folk melodies drawn from the DSQ\u2019s terrific Keel Road<\/em> album, got introduced with the phrase, \u201cNow you can enjoy the music again.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last Friday\u2019s 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\u2019s \u201cDoppelg\u00e4nger\u201d 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\u2019s late works for strings. I had heard and appreciated the Thomas Ad\u00e8s response, paired with Schubert\u2019s String Quintet, during their last Zankel appearance; this time I heard and appreciated Bent S\u00f8rensen\u2019s composition, inspired by the last of Schubert\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 S\u00f8rensen piece\u2014along with the program\u2019s final flourish, an adaptation of Schubert\u2019s \u201cDoppelg\u00e4nger\u201d song for string quartet\u2014felt like gravy, or icing, or whatever you get when you don\u2019t actually need anything more. But like gravy or icing, it was a plus, because it is always a plus to hear the Danes play.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They are not entirely Danish, by the way\u2014the cellist is a Norwegian\u2014and this time the they were even more internationally varied than usual. One of the two violinists, Rune Tonsgaard S\u00f8rensen (no relation, as far as I know, to Bent), was back home on parental leave and had been temporarily replaced by the Los Angeles\u2013based violinist Yura Lee. Introducing us to Rune\u2019s \u201cdoppelg\u00e4nger\u201d in his brief, graceful talk before the performance, the violist Asbj\u00f8rn N\u00f8rgaard 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 \u201cit is always good when people from different countries can join together to make something.\u201d 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\u2014a 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[33,809,810,40,64,333,647,299,21],"class_list":["post-1495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-lesser-blog","tag-alice-tully-hall","tag-asjborn-norgaard","tag-bent-sorensen-2","tag-cal-performances","tag-carnegie-hall","tag-danish-string-quartet","tag-pierre-boulez-saal","tag-schubert","tag-shostakovich"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1495","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1495"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1495\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1507,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1495\/revisions\/1507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}