Ravinia 2023 Issue 3

CAROLINE BITTENCOURT 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.” 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 sys- tem of having the group’s two violin- ists 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 ef- fective, 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 classi- cal 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 Scan- dinavian folk music on its programs, a practice that Sørensen sees as com- plementary and a “very natural thing.” Cellist Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin and he listened to and played folk music growing up, and through their influ- ence, 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 perfor- mance 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 Nor- wegian, as his replacement in 2008. Two of the remaining players, violist Asbjørn Nørgaard and Sørensen, knew him from their studies to- gether 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-mu- sic 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. Not only was the group accepted, it continues to be associated with the Chamber Music Society, which has given it wide visibility, to the tune of performances 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 combina- tion. “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 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 litera- ture. “This No. 7 is a very short piece of music,” the violinist said, “but he manages to compress so many emo- tions 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 . RAVINIA MAGAZINE • JULY 17 – JULY 30, 2023 14