Last night in Herbst Theatre, San Francisco Performances (SFP) launched its Chamber Series with the return of the Danish String Quartet (DSQ). The ensemble, whose members are violinists Frederik Øland and Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen, who share the leadership chair, violist Asbjørn Nørgaard, and cellist Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin, made their SFP debut in February of 2018; and last night was their second appearance. The program was particularly distinguished as one of those rare encounters with the string quartets of Robert Schumann.
What makes those encounters rare is that Schumann composed only three of those quartets, his Opus 41. They were written early in 1842, a year in which the composer devoted himself to writing chamber music; and the Opus 41 set made for the only pieces he wrote that did not require a piano. DSQ devoted the second half of their program to the third quartet in the set, written in the key of A major. According to my records, this was my first encounter with Opus 41 since April of 2019, when the SFP presented the third appearance of the Elias String Quartet. Their selection was the first quartet in the set in the key of A minor.
The A major quartet could have played a leading role back in the days of Trivial Pursuits. To the best of my knowledge, it is the earliest “classical” string quartet I have encountered whose first movement is in 3/4 time. Since Schumann was often given to “exploratory experimentation,” I was not that surprised at this departure from convention. However, the Danish players seemed to “get” this departure from convention, allowing it to throw new light on rhetorical approaches to the quartet genre.
The first half of the program had its own exploratory approach to programming, pairing Benjamin Britten’s early set of three divertimenti with Mozart’s early K. 138 divertimento in F major. Both of the divertimentos were youthful undertakings. K. 138 was the last of the three “Salzburg Symphonies,” which he composed in his mid-teens for either string quartet or string orchestra; and Britten had just turned twenty when his three-movement divertimento (the only movements from his original five-movement plan) was first performed. Britten was never particularly satisfied with his results, while K. 138 may well have ended up as “background music” for one of the social events arranged by Hieronymus von Colloredo, the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg.
Last night, however, the pairing of these two compositions made for a refreshing “opener” for the DSQ program. They “warmed up” the audience in preparation for their account of the more mature K. 428 quartet in E-flat major. In the chamber music genre this is Mozart at his best. It is one of those works in which the attentive listener, even if (s)he is not an “expert,” can appreciate that every note is situated exactly where it belongs. Most adventurous is the third (Menuetto) movement, whose rather straightforward dance music takes on new dimensions through prolongation after prolongation.
Following the program DSQ returned to the stage for a departure from the usual approach to encores. The third (Adagio) movement of Joseph Haydn’s Hoboken III/1 string quartet in B-flat major was performed as a memorial tribute to Geoff Nuttall, co-founder and first violinist of the St. Lawrence String Quartet and artist-in-residence at Stanford University, who died of cancer at the age of 56 earlier this month on October 19. The DSQ performance suggested that there are strong bonds in the community of chamber musicians that are not strained (or restrained) by national boundaries.
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