The Danish String Quartet, one of the most widely-acclaimed chamber
groups of the present moment, makes its first recording for ECM, with a
programme of Danish and British music. The pieces featured here, all
written when the respective composers were each barely into their 20s,
have retained a freshness and intensity vividly conveyed in the Danish
String Quartet’s energetic and assured interpretations.
Per Nørgård’s Quartetto Breve (1952), Hans Abrahamsen’s 10 Preludes (1973), and Thomas Adès’s Arcadiana (1994),
represent first forays, for each of the composers, into the world of
the string quartet. The Nørgård quartet appears to reflect the influence
of Bartók, as well as the lean tonality of Nørgård’s teacher, Vagn
Holmboe. Nørgård would become an influential teacher in his own right,
and Hans Abrahamsen, one of his most talented pupils, was inspired by
the minimalism which the older composer had drawn into his music. In his
10 Preludes, Abrahamsen gives to his pulse patterns a modal
colour deriving from folk song, a musical resource with which the Danish String Quartet can readily identify.
“We may feel,” writes Paul Griffiths in the liner notes, “that the
precision of nuance, the warm and intelligent closeness of voices and
the command of form these musicians bring to Abrahamsen as to Nørgård
comes from some common heritage or sympathy, and yet the same fine
qualities shine through their performance of the Adès piece, Arcadiana.
They even have very effective ideas of their own here, such as the
expressive tremulation they bring to the ensemble glissando early in the
middle movement.” Adès’s Arcadiana is a kaleidoscopic fantasy
in which “metres are prone to slip and slide, chords to mutate in
meaning, disintegrate or dissolve, all within a scintillant harmonic
world that, though partly shared with traditional forces, is the
composer’s own.” (ECM Records)
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