Biography

Frederik Øland  -  violin
Rune Tonsgraard Sørensen  -  violin
Asbjørn Nørgaard  -  viola
Frederik Schøgen Sjölin  -  cello

The Danish String Quartet celebrated its twentieth-anniversary season in 2022-23. This GRAMMY-nominated ensemble continues to assert its preeminence among the world’s finest string quartets. It is like no other. Its totally down-to-earth, casual, audience-friendly mentality is embodied in how the musicians describe themselves: “We are three Danes and one Norwegian cellist, making this a truly Scandinavian endeavor. Being relatively bearded, we are often compared to the Vikings. However, we are only pillaging the English coastline occasionally. The three [Danes in the group] met very early in our lives in the Danish countryside at a summer camp for enthusiastic amateur musicians. Not yet teenagers, we were the youngest players, so we hung out all the time playing football and chamber music together.” The group made its first recordings - the complete Nielsen quartets  - in 2006-2008 as the Young Danish String Quartet, immediately attracting the attention of such publications as Gramophone magazine and the New York Times. Since then the quartet has gone on to perform in major concert halls across the world in repertory ranging from Beethoven and Mozart to Adès and Nørgård, and even to folk music. '‘Other interests of the group include vintage cars, cooking, gaming, reading, playing, talking, scuba diving, playing tennis, and being dads of babies and toddlers.’' In February of 2020 the Danish String Quartet returned to Lincoln Center in New York as the featured quartet performing the entire Beethoven cycle. The Quartet’s discography reflects the ensemble’s special affinity for Scandinavian composers. LMMC debut.

https://www.kirshbaumassociates.com/artist.php?id=danishstringquartet&aview=bio

Notes

Purcell’s Chacony (an early form of the word chaconne) dates from about 1680. A chaconne is a dance form in moderately slow triple meter commonly found in music of the Baroque period. A succession of pitches in the bass voice serves as a continuous, self-repeating formula over which are built variations of accompaniment figures, additional thematic ideas, various rhythmic patterns, and other material.

The Haydn quartet we hear today comes from 1772, a period in which many composers were influenced by the so-called Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) movement then circulating in artistic circles. In music this took the form of greater emotional depth, turbulent writing, the use of minor keys, and contrapuntal complexity – all qualities found in Op. 20, No. 3. Also new in the six Op. 20 quartets was the liberation of the cello part from servitude as a mere bass accompaniment, and the full participation of all four instruments as near-equals.

Shostakovich wrote his Seventh Quartet in 1960 in memory of his first wife, Nina, with whom he had lived for 26 years. Although short in duration (only about twelve minutes), it feels anything but small. It has an intensely personal, almost withdrawn but also unsettled quality that points the way to many of the composer’s later works, particularly in its spare scoring (there are frequent passages where only one or two instruments are playing). The three movements, all melodically interrelated, are played without pause.

It is usually risky to equate a composer’s state of mind with the music he may be writing at the time, but in the case of Schubert’s D-minor quartet of 1824 there is a definite correspondence. Its prevailing somber, tragic mood reflects his gloomy thoughts on life and death, the past and the future, for he was seriously ill with the disease that would soon kill him (probably syphilis). All four movements are in minor tonalities. The quartet takes its nickname “Death and the Maiden” from a song of the same title Schubert had written seven years earlier to a poem by Matthias Claudius. Schubert borrowed the song’s opening passage, slightly modified, to serve as the basis of a set of variations for the second movement. This passage represents the slow tread of Death as it approaches the girl.

Robert Markow