Danish String Quartet,
presented by Cal Performances, Berkeley, February 17, 2019.
It’s often hard in a concert to separate your reaction to the performers from your response to the music they’re playing. This is not necessarily a bad thing—a certain amount of synaesthesia is one of the virtues of seeing and hearing music played live—but it can be confusing at times.
The Danish String Quartet suffers from, or possibly benefits from, but at any rate is burdened by the fact that virtually all first-time audience members find these guys adorable. That is the word I repeatedly hear from other people at their concerts, and I’ve even used it myself. It’s not just that the four blonde or blondish-brown mopheads conjure up subliminal associations with the early Beatles. And it’s not just that as a group they seem to be having such a good time, whether they are regaling us with quartet classics or introducing us to a new piece. It has something to do with the sense of intimacy they create, not just among the four players themselves, but also between them and us. In practicing their special kind of charisma, they manage to provoke in us the warmest kinds of feelings—for themselves, for the composers they represent, and for the works they are choosing to program. Yet one curious side-effect of this intense charm is to make one somehow forget, in the periods that elapse between their concerts, that in addition to being adorable, they are also absolutely superb musicians.
I first heard the Danes (who are actually three Danes and a Norwegian) at their California debut, which took place at the Music@Menlo festival in the summer of 2013. Most newcomers at Music@Menlo get introduced by Wu Han—the co-curator of the festival, along with her husband, David Finckel —and in introducing the then-very-young Danish String Quartet, she began with an anecdote about a recent music competition in which she had served on the judging panel. As chamber group after chamber group took the stage, the judges diligently recorded their opinions, carefully ranking the players according to this or that pre-set measure. And then the Danish String Quartet came out and started to play and, as Wu Han said, “We all just put down our pencils.”
That is how the critic, or at least this critic, feels time and time again at their performances. The quality of their playing is so self-evidently high, and the experience of listening is so overwhelmingly delightful, that you simply surrender to it. There is no need to evaluate or compare, no concern about “right” and “wrong” ways to interpret a given work, because you are just mainlining pleasure. It is the best way to hear chamber music, and it is also an effective pedagogical tool, in that even the unfamiliar compositions (a suite of folksong-based adaptations, say, or a recent work by the contemporary composer Hans Abrahamsen) can seem of a piece with the enchanting Haydn or Beethoven quartet that preceded or followed it. We are rendered receptive by the friendly ease with which these four players transmit all their enthusiasms, for old and new alike.
Part of their method is non-verbal: the way they sway to the music when they play, for instance, or exchange glances with each other, or smile as they approach the end of a vigorous fast movement. But part of it has to do with words. At every concert of theirs I’ve attended—and I’ve been to at least six over the years—one or another of them addresses the audience from the stage. Often but not always, these unscripted, casual talks will occur before the thorniest, newest pieces on the program, as if to reassure us by explaining why the four of them feel so strongly about that particular work.
Last November, when I attended the ensemble’s debut at the 92nd Street Y in New York, I was afraid that the size and prestige of the venue might prevent the Danes from launching into their usual conversation with us. But I needn’t have worried. Right before they were to perform Hans Abrahamsen’s 1973 “10 Preludes” quartet (a work that no more than a handful of people in the hall could have heard before), Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen—the smaller, blonder, and more boyish-looking of the two violinists—gave us an eloquent summary of what this piece had meant to the four of them. His brief speech not only offered us something tangible to hang onto during the gauzily atmospheric moments that followed; it also made us feel personally connected to the players in a way that large concert halls rarely allow us to do.
In February’s concert in Berkeley, it was the violist, Asbørn Nørgaard, who spoke, introducing the Anton Webern quartet by pointing out how specifically it conveyed its 1905 Viennese origins. Just as the young Webern, not yet the twelve-tone figure of his mature years, was simultaneously looking backward at his Viennese predecessors (“the old guys,” Nørgaard called them) and forward to something he couldn’t yet imagine, so too was Europe poised, in 1905, between what it solidly had been and what it confusingly was about to become.
Like all their other concerts, this February performance was masterfully programmed. It began with Haydn’s Opus 20, No. 2, a warm, friendly, thoroughly accessible yet occasionally dark-hued piece in the sunny key of C Major. After this contribution from the Austrian father of the string quartet form, we leapt forward to the work of his distant offspring, Webern, who struggled against the achievements of his ancestors even as he acknowledged them. And then, as Nørgaard pointed out, we moved in the second half of the program to precisely the ancestral piece from which Webern quoted in the opening notes of his own quartet—that is, Beethoven’s magisterial Opus 135.
Whenever the Danish String Quartet plays Beethoven (and they often do), I wish I could hear them perform the whole cycle, because what they uncover in each brilliant composition is both utterly familiar and completely new. This time was no exception; and after we wholeheartedly applauded them for the third time, they sat down to present what Rune Sørenson described as the sole encore they play at the end of every concert. This is a lovely hymn called Mit hjerte altid vanker (it translates roughly as “My heart remains in wonder”) by the Danish master Carl Nielsen, something of a hero to the quartet. “We only have one encore,” Sørensen apologized, “but that doesn’t make it less beautiful if you’ve heard it before.” He also managed to point out, as if in passing, that the F Major key of the Nielsen picked up and continued the key of the Beethoven that had preceded it. I never feel, at such moments, as if I am being lectured to, but my ear learns something nevertheless.
On the day before their Cal Performances appearance, the Quartet’s four players offered a series of master classes to students from the UC Berkeley music department. Members of the public were invited to attend free of charge, and since I have learned through experience that master classes, like rehearsals, can be even more rewarding than finished performances, I gave up my Saturday morning in return for the pleasure of witnessing something new.
I stopped in briefly to watch the violinist Fredrik Øland—he of the pompadour and the extremely high forehead—working with a group on the Schumann Piano Quartet in E flat Major. And I peeked in next door as well, where Nørgaard, the violist, was overseeing a movement of Ravel’s beloved string quartet. (In fact, the only class I missed entirely, to my regret, was the one in which the cellist, Fredrik Schøyen Sjöllin, supervised a Rossini duet for cello and double bass.) But I spent most of the morning watching Rune Sørensen give advice to a pianist, a cellist, and a violinist who were grappling with the first movement of Brahms’s Piano Trio in B Major. It’s a piece I love anyway, even in recordings, and to hear it instructively taken apart and movingly put together again by a master musician was a thrill I won’t soon forget.
Sørensen began by applauding the two young women and the young man as they ended their presentation. “Great, guys,” he said, and then asked them how long they had been practicing the piece. When he learned it was only two weeks, he nodded sympathetically. “That’s why you’re still too attached to your music stands,” he observed. What he wanted from them instead was “more expression up here from you”—and with this he indicated his own upper body. He then cited an example from a specific passage near the beginning: “Playing forte is not just loud. I want expression in your eyes or faces, not just volume or loudness.” Later he made a similar point in regard to a different section. “Maybe you could be more clear in showing us the architecture of that movement,” he suggested, “showing us that transition to the lyrical, the way you move into that transition. Something in your body or your face needs to show it, to be a bit more helpful to us.”
To each of the three, he gave highly specific and sometimes technical advice: demonstrating on the piano the exact chords where the pianist needed to “open it up” for the violin’s entrance rather than “closing it so much”; telling the cellist to bow “a little bit closer to the bridge, and stronger on the A string—really pull the sound out of it”; and questioning the violinist’s bowing at the moment of her first entrance.
“Is that really the right bowing?” he asked. “It seems so unnatural to start with a downbow.”
When she offered to try it the other way, he said encouragingly, “Can you do that?” At this point he also went to his violin case and got out his own instrument, continuing to talk all the while: “We at the Danish String Quartet are quite liberal about bowing, if the story comes out better than way.” He showed her how his version of the phrase would go, and she repeated it; then he made her play it over and over again until it was “one big slur” rather than a series of consecutive notes.
In the course of the class, it became clear that Sørensen had a very strong connection with this piece of music, despite the fact that it’s not a part of the quartet repertoire. As he got the violinist to repeat, ever more quietly, a small solo passage, he commented, “Because it is really the most lonely place in music history.” Just before that, he indicated that he wanted the piano to be “maybe somehow more spooky—a little bit darker, if you can.” At a moment when the music shifted suddenly, he asked them, “Were you surprised at this spot? I’m asking a bit rhetorically. But you cannot make the audience surprised if you are not a little afraid and surprised yourself. That bass should be like an earthquake: people should jump in their chairs.” And as the entire movement approached its ending and opened out into plangent full-throatedness, he came up with a specific metaphor to guide them. “What I just thought of—it’s a nice picture—if you imagine a closed door and someone’s playing behind it. And then you open the door. And in your body language, really open up.” As they played that section through one final time (with a distinctly observable increase in the feeling they lent to it), Sørensen took in the music by weaving his upper body from side to side, waving his arms, and even extending his fingers—not as if he were conducting the three players, but as if their performance itself drew this bodily response from him.
He applauded them again when they had finished playing. Then he concluded the lesson by repeating his essential piece of advice, about the need to express the music.
“The visual: it means so much when we go to a concert,” he pointed out. “We hear what we see.”
As I listened to him say this, I realized for the first time that my sense of confusion about the Danish String Quartet—my unwitting tendency to replace coolly judgmental admiration with something much closer to warm affection, and my corresponding lack of focus on the players’ high level of skill—is not a chance by-product of their method. It reflects their exact intentions. What comes across as an almost personal intimacy is the result of a purposeful effort on their part to guide their audiences through the music, visually and viscerally. These four string players are using their bodies and their faces not just to engage or charm us, but to transmit something important that might otherwise escape us. And the thing is, it works.
Wendy Lesser, the founding editor of The Threepenny Review, is the author of twelve books, most recently Jerome Robbins: A Life in Dance.
