Last night the Danish String Quartet (DSQ) made its third visit to Herbst Theatre to perform a recital presented by San Francisco Performances. Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen took the leadership chair with Frederik Øland on second violin, violist Asbjørn Nørgaard, and cellist Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin. Much of the program was devoted to traditional Nordic music; and, to politely suggest that they have been keeping up with news about our President, many of those selections originated in Greenland.
This attention to folk music was preceded by works of two major twentieth-century composers, Igor Stravinsky and Alfred Schnittke. The contrast could not have been more engaging. Stravinsky’s Suite Italienne consists of selected movements from the ballet “Pulcinella,” whose score appropriated compositions by Giovanni Pergolesi. The composer clearly enjoyed having his way with eighteenth-century Italian tradition, and his instrumentation had some raucous moments to underscore the ballet’s narrative. DSQ provided its own arrangement of the suite’s movements, which may not have been quite as raucous but were still high-spirited.
Photograph of Alfred Schnittke in Moscow taken by Dmitri N. Smirnov, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)
This was followed by Schnittke’s second string quartet. This composition also had a “background source” in the form of Russian church music. However, the composer’s capacity for intense dissonance tended to override any reflections on liturgical traditions. The thorns in Schnittke’s music are long and sharp, and I must confess that it took a fair amount of listening experience for me to begin to find my way through his string quartets. Nevertheless, last night it was clear that DSQ had a firm command of Schnittke’s unforgiving rhetorical stances. Now that I am more familiar with those stances, I could appreciate the intensity of DSQ’s interpretation of his music.
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