DSQ to Balance Traditional Music with 20C

The members of DSQ, “three Danes and one Norwegian cellist” (from the event page for their next SFP recital)

Next month the Danish String Quartet (DSQ) will return to Herbst Theatre for another recital presented by San Francisco Performances (SFP). The members of the ensemble have not changed since their last visit: violinists Frederik Øland and Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen, who share the leadership chair, violist Asbjørn Nørgaard, and cellist Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin. This will be their first appearance since their last visit in the fall of 2022, when they prepared a program for SFP consisting of works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Robert Schumann, and Benjamin Britten with an encore by Joseph Haydn.

This time, the second half of the program will be devoted to arrangements of traditional Nordic music, prepared collectively by the four members of the quartet. The program will begin with another of their arrangements, this time of music by Igor Stravinsky. Suite italienne consisted of compositions by Giambattista Pergolesi that Stravinsky had appropriated for his score for the one-act ballet “Pulcinella.” DSQ rearranged this orchestral suite for string quartet. As a result, there will be only one composer on the program whose music was not arranged. That will be Alfred Schnittke, whose second string quartet will be performed after the Stravinsky arrangement.

This performance will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 14. The venue will be Herbst Theatre, which many (most?) readers know is located in the heart of the Civic Center at 401 Van Ness Avenue, on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. Ticket prices will be $85, $75, and $65. As those readers probably also know, SFP has created a Web page for purchasing those tickets.