Good Folk
By Kyle MacMillan
Despite being a tiny country with a population smaller than that of the Chicago metropolitan area, Denmark has nonetheless long exerted an outsized impact on classical music. Think Carl Nielsen, the country’s best-known composer, whose works are regularly performed internationally, especially his six distinctive symphonies.
In the world of chamber music, the country has produced several notable groups, including the Kontra Quartet, named for its first violinist, Hungarian-born virtuoso Anton Kontra. It formed in 1973 and toured worldwide for more than 25 years.
Among the most famous of today’s ensembles is one whose name enthusiastically trumpets its country of origin—the Danish String Quartet, which is marking its 20th anniversary during the 2022–23 season. Early in its history, it was already being cited as one of the world’s top quartets, and that praise has only solidified as the group has matured, including its selection as the 2020 Ensemble of the Year by Musical America.
The Danish Quartet will make its second visit to the Ravinia Festival on July 27 as part of a five-concert American tour that also takes it to another prestigious summer series, the Tanglewood Music Festival in Massachusetts, as well as three smaller venues.
The four original members of the quartet, three of whom still remain, met when they were in their mid-teens at a summer music camp in the Danish countryside, spending as much time playing soccer as chamber music and quickly becoming close friends. In 2001, Tim Frederiksen, a professor at the Royal Danish Academy whom DSQ violinist Frederik Øland called the “godfather of Danish chamber music,” learned of the budding ensemble and offered to coach the four players. They quickly took him up on his offer and worked with him intensively. “He meant a lot to us, especially in the early years of our career,” Øland said.
In 2002, the group made its professional debut at the Copenhagen Summer Festival on a hot July evening, with the players taking to heart Frederiksen’s guidance to walk briskly on stage with an air of self-confidence. “That was a turning point,” said violinist Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen. “We had been working together for quite some time and he got us this gig. Everything was leading up to that one event, and it was packed hall. A really crazy atmosphere in the air.”
Word quickly spread about the quartet, and the musicians, still in their teens, found themselves showered with booking offers. “We had no idea what was coming for us at that time,” Sørensen said. “We enjoyed playing together and we had fun doing it. Then, suddenly, we almost had a career even before we started at the [Royal] Academy of Music. So, it all went really fast at the beginning.”
According to Øland, one of the biggest challenges for the young quartet was picking a name. “Do you go with something Greek?” he said. “Do you go with a composer? We went through a lot of different names, and we just couldn’t it figure out.” But then the members worked up the courage to ask Frederiksen if they could take over the Danish Quartet name. Four groups have carried the “Danish” name, including one that their mentor had led in 1985–96 and, earlier, one in which his father had performed. Frederiksen consented, and the group called itself the Young Danish Quartet at first to dispel some of the pressure that came with the historical moniker.
Like many budding string quartets, the Danish Quartet held the famed Emerson String Quartet up as a kind of model. After all, many people in the field consider the elder group, which has announced it will stop performing after a final set of New York concerts in October, to be the top such ensemble in the world. “We could see that these guys were just an amazing group,” Sørensen said. “We listened to their albums a lot and were quite attracted to their sound. This very potent, powerful playing really spoke to us at the time.”
“We enjoyed playing together and we had fun doing it. Then, suddenly, we almost had a career even before we started at the [Royal] Academy of Music. It all went really fast at the beginning.”
But as much as these budding Scandinavian musicians admired their older American counterparts and their top-drawer musicianship, they didn’t try to copy to them. (It did adopt the Emerson’s pioneering system of having the group’s two violinists take turns in the first and second parts.) Indeed, the Danish Quartet has developed a different sound—less muscular and more in keeping with the refined European aesthetic. “We just heard a string quartet that spoke to us at the time, but now we play quite differently than they do and they did,” Sørensen said.
The Danish Quartet brought a free-spiritedness to its playing that critics quickly noted. “Theirs is playing of unusual, and unusually effective, liberty,” wrote David Allen in 2016 in the New York Times. “When at their best, their tone throbs with joy.” Sørensen made a similar observation, noting that the group is not weighed down by the heavy tradition of classical music in Central Europe. “I think that also defines how Scandinavian musicians in general are approaching music,” he said, “maybe with more freedom, because we don’t feel that we stand on the shoulders of something big, so to speak.”
Also setting the Danish Quartet apart is its frequent inclusion of Scandinavian folk music on its programs, a practice that Sørensen sees as complementary and a “very natural thing.” Cellist Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin and he listened to and played folk music growing up, and through their influence, the quartet began playing some of this music for encores. The players discovered they enjoyed the creative process of making folk arrangements, and the encores soon led to Wood Works (2014), the first of what will soon be three albums, and then the regular inclusion of such music on their programs, including its performance at Ravinia. “It turned out to become a thing that we felt we had in our group that gave us something that others didn’t have,” Sørensen said. The group has also asserted its heritage through its recording of the complete set of Nielsen quartets in 2007–8 and a 2016 release that includes works by Danish composers Per Nørgård and Hans Abrahamsen.
After the quartet’s original cellist left the group, it chose Sjölin, a Norwegian, as his replacement in 2008. Two of the remaining players, violist Asbjørn Nørgaard and Sørensen, knew him from their studies together in Sweden. After Øland met and played with him at the Verbier Festival in Switzerland, they decided to give him a call and see if he would be willing to join the quartet. The four agreed that they would try it for a year and then talk about how things were going. “We never had that talk,” Øland said. “There was absolutely no reason for it. We had a great time, and he’s been a great influence on the quartet.”
The quartet’s personnel has remained unchanged since then, and Øland believes that stability and the brotherly bonds that developed among the foursome has been another important reason for the group’s success. “We’ve spent more than 20 years together now,” he said, “and we’ve gone through all kinds of joyful occasions in life and tragedies. We’re still together, and that’s because of the friendship that we share.”
In 2013, the New York–based Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center chose the quartet for a three-year stint in what is now known as the Bowers Program, which provides support to emerging chamber-music talents from around the world. One of the group’s managers heard about the program and encouraged the quartet to apply even though the members saw it as a long shot. “We were this odd string quartet from Scandinavia that no one had heard about,” Sørensen said. But they went ahead and did it, in part because of the timing of the auditions, which fell right after New Year’s. “We decided, ‘If we don’t get it, we’ll at least get a New Year’s Eve in New York. That sounds pretty fun,” he said.
“We’ve spent more than 20 years together now, and we’ve gone through all kinds of joyful occasions in life and tragedies. We’re still together, and that’s because of the friendship that we share.”
Not only was the group accepted, it continues to be associated with the Chamber Music Society, which has given it big visibility in the United States and helped it gain representation by the US-based management firm, Kirshbaum Associates Inc. It has performed in 37 states and multiple venues across Canada. During the 2022–23 season, the group will have performed 28 concerts in North America, a sizeable portion of its schedule. “It is a lot,” Sørensen said. “It has become our second home court, somehow, the US. It’s great for us. We really enjoy it.”
The Danish Quartet will open its Ravinia program with the String Quartet in G minor, op. 20, no. 3, by Joseph Haydn, who is often called the “father of the string quartet” because he wrote 68 works for the combination. “His opus 20 quartets are just six little gems in the literature,” Sørensen said. “They are so creative.” The quartet loves playing Haydn’s music, which Sørensen believes might still be underrated. “It’s always inspiring, full of imagination and so fun, because as a performer you can allow yourself a lot of freedom in the music,” he said.
Then comes arrangements of fugues from J.S. Bach’s The Art of Fugue, which Sørensen said work “surprisingly well” for the string quartet. That section of the program concludes with Dmitri Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 7, one of the 15 works in the form that 20th-century Russian composer wrote across his lifetime—one of the most acclaimed sets in the quartet literature. “This No. 7 is a very short piece of music,” the violinist said, “but he manages to compress so many emotions into that compact shape. It’s just typical Shostakovich. Great music, very impactful, very strong.” ■
Kyle MacMillan served as classical music critic for the Denver Post from 2000 through 2011. He currently freelances in Chicago, writing for such publications and websites as the Chicago Sun-Times, Early Music America, Opera News, and Classical Voice of North America.