Danish String Quartet PRISM III

 

PRISM III

Danish String Quartet PRISM II

The Danish String Quartet’s Grammy-nominated Prism project links Bach fugues, late Beethoven quartets and works by modern masters. In volume two of the series, Bach’s Fugue in Bb minor from the Well-Tempered Clavier (in the arrangement by Viennese composer Emanuel Aloys Förster) is brought together with Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 130 and Alfred Schnittke’s String Quartet No.3 (composed in 1983). As the quartet explains, “A beam of music is split through Beethoven’s prism. The important thing to us is that these connections be experienced widely. We hope the listener will join us in the wonder of thee beams of music that travel all the way from Bach through Beethoven to our own times.” Recorded in historic Reitstadel Neumarkt and produced by Manfred Eicher, the album is issued as the Danish String Quartet embarks on a tour with dates on both sides of the Atlantic, climaxing with a run of Prism concerts on the West Coast of the U.S. The Quartet plays the full Prism cycle at La Jolla Music Society over five concerts in late November.

Danish String Quartet PRISM I

For its third ECM release, the Danish String Quartet – hailed by the Washington Post as “one of the best quartets before the public today” and as simply “terrific” by The Guardian – inaugurates a series of albums with the overarching title of Prism, in which the group will present one of Beethoven’s late string quartets in the context of a related fugue by J.S. Bach as well as a linked masterwork from the quartet literature. With Prism 1, it is the first of Beethoven’s late quartets, his grand Op. 127 in E-flat Major, alongside Bach’s luminous fugue in the same key (arranged by Mozart) and Dmitri Shostakovich’s final string quartet, No. 15 in E-flat minor, a haunted and haunting sequence of six adagios.

For Prism 1, the DSQ convened at the Reitstadel in Neumarkt, Germany, the group applying its lyricism and spirit of ensemble to this interconnected sound world of Bach, Beethoven and Shostakovich. Bach’s fugue in E-flat Major, BWV 876, was one of five pieces that Mozart transcribed for string quartet from his predecessor’s epochal collection of preludes and fugues, The Well-Tempered Clavier. Like Mozart, Beethoven also revered Bach and studied The Well-Tempered Clavier closely, his playing of its pieces noted in press reports on the young performer. Beethoven’s five late string quartets were his ultimate statement in music; the first three of these late quartets were commissioned by a Russian prince, in 1822. Shostakovich’s 15 string quartets constitute the greatest cycle of such works after Beethoven; the rarified example of the German’s late quartets was surely on the Russian composer’s mind as he completed his final – and longest and most intimate – work in the genre, in 1974, the year before his death.The spacious grandeur of Beethoven’s late quartets and, in particular, their epically hymnal slow movements – including that of the Op. 127, marked Adagio, mon non troppo e molto cantabile – were an obvious, powerful influence on the adagios of Shostakovich’s final quartet. Reflecting on the impact of Beethoven’s late string quartets, the DSQ note that “they changed the game. Every composer after Beethoven had to consider these five works and somehow figure out how to carry on the torch. Beethoven had taken a fundamentally linear development from Bach and exploded everything into myriad colors, directions and opportunities.” (ECM Records)

Danish String Quartet LAST LEAF

They are widely recognised as the most exciting young string quartet of the present moment, bringing new insights to contemporary composition and core classical repertoire. In parallel, they have also made surprising and impressive forays into the world of Nordic folk music. Their 2014 album Wood Works (Dacapo Records) was a left-field hit, and audiences around the world have been delighted by concert performances of the music. Now the Danish String Quartet bring their folk project to ECM with a stirring new recording. Last Leaf took its initial inspiration from an unusual Christmas hymn, “Now found is the fairest of roses”, published in 1732 by Danish theologian and poet H.A. Brorson. The hymn is set to a mysterious, dark melody: Brorson had chosen an old Lutheran funeral choral to accompany his Christmas hymn, elegantly showing how life and death are always connected. “From here we embark on a travel through the rich fauna of Nordic folk melodies until returning to Brorson in the end,” say the DSQ. “It is a journey that could have been made in many different ways, but we believe that we returned with some nice souvenirs. In these old melodies, we find immense beauty and depth, and we can't help but sing them through the medium of our string quartet. Brorson found the fairest of roses, we found a bunch of amazing tunes – and we hope you will enjoy what we did to them.” (ECM Records)

Danish String Quartet THOMAS ADÈS, PER NORGARD, HANS ABRAHAMSEN

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)