SFP Video Previews: Danish String Quartet

Danish String Quartet members Frederik Øland, Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin, Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen, and Asbjørn Nørgaard (photograph by Caroline Bittencourt, courtesy of ECM)

The Chamber Series in the 2020–21 San Francisco Performances (SFP) season is scheduled to begin with the return of the Danish String Quartet. This group, consisting of violinists Frederik Øland and Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen, who share the leadership chair, violist Asbjørn Nørgaard, and cellist Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin, made its San Francisco debut with SFP in February of 2018. Their program was a straightforward coupling of Béla Bartók’s Opus 7 (first) string quartet with the first (in F major) of the three Opus 59 quartets that Ludwig van Beethoven wrote in 1806 for the Russian ambassador in Vienna, Count Andreas Razumovsky. The only hint of “nationalism” came with the encore selection, an arrangement of a song by Carl Nielsen.

Ironically, that concert season had begun in September with the release of the quartet’s ECM New Series album Last Leaf, which was devoted almost entirely to quartet arrangements of a diversity of Nordic folk sources. That album was reviewed by Tom Huizenga on NPR’s Deceptive Cadence Web site. Huizenga paid particular attention to the performance of “Æ Rømeser,” which he described as “an 18th-century dance from the village of Sønderho, situated at the southern end of Fanø, one of the many Danish islands that hug the country's west coast.” ECM released a video of the quartet’s performance of “Æ Rømeser” on January 5, 2018; and that is the video that SFP has selected for its “gallery” of video previews.

While this video is only about four minutes long, it makes for a highly engaging experience of both listening and viewing. While the tune was intended for dance, the rhetoric is stately and perhaps a bit wistfully mournful. Regardless of its folk origins, the quartet arrangement is richly polyphonic. While there are a few minor slip-ups in where the camera is directed, the overall viewing experience definitely facilitates awareness of those polyphonic textures. There is also a clever conclusion: as the music dissolves into silence through hushed pizzicato passages, the video image gradually blurs as a “parting gesture.”