Danish String Quartet - Program and Notes

Rune Tonsgaard Sorensen, Violin        Frederik Øland, Violin            Asbjørn Nørgaard, Viola             Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin, Cello

The Danish String Quartet, formerly known as The Young Danish String Quartet, made its debut at the Copenhagen Summer Festival in 2002.  In a remarkably short time, the quartet drew attention for its highly committed musicianship and enthralling style, and the ensemble soon established itself as the most promising news in the classical music  world in Denmark.  After winning the Danish Radio P2 Chamber Music Competition in 2004, the quartet was renowned in Denmark and became frequent guests in Danish festivals, music societies, and international chamber music venues.
    The Danish String Quartet has entered numerous competitions with great success. After winning the P2 competition as the youngest musicians ever, the quartet won First Prize at the Vagn Holmboe String Quartet Competition and the Charles Hennen International Chamber Music Competition in Holland, as well as First Prize and Audience Prize at the Trondheim International String Quartet Competition in 2005.  In 2009 the quartet won First Prize at the Eleventh London International String Quartet Competition, and garnered four other awards: The 20th Century Prize, the Beethoven Prize, the Sidney Griller Award, and the Menton Festival Prize.
    In 2006 Danish Radio made The Danish String Quartet “Artist in Residence” which led to solo performances with the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Danish Radio Sinfonietta, playing works by Elgar and O. A. Thommessen. This position gave the ensemble the opportunity to record all of Carl Nielsen's string quartets in the Danish Radio Concert Hall. These recordings, on the Dacapo label in 2007 and 2008, were hailed by critics and were named Editor’s Choice by the classical music magazine Gramophone.
    The Danish String Quartet's main teacher and mentor has always been Professor Tim Frederiksen. In addition, the quartet has participated in master classes and received instruction from the Tokyo and Emerson Quartets, Alasdair Tait, Paul Katz, Hugh Maguire, Levon Chilingirian, Are Sandbakken, Mats Zetterquist, and Jan-Erik Gustafsson.
    The joy of playing, the powerful impact the musicians make on stage, and their fresh approach to well-known repertoire have become trademarks of The Danish String Quartet. These qualities have led to success far beyond Denmark. The New York Times’ main critic was amazed by the quartet's 2004 debut concert in New York, writing that “I cannot imagine a more involved performance.”
Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen, violin, was born in 1983 and started playing the violin at the age of five at the Suzuki Institute. Since then he has studied under Alexander Zapolski, Ulf Wallin of the Esbjerg Music Academy, Mihaela Martin at Hochschule der Künste in Köln, and Professor Serguei Azizian, among others. He made his highly praised debut with the Copenhagen Philharmonic in 2009. From 2008 Mr. Sørensen has been concertmaster at the Copenhagen Philharmonic, and teaches violin and chamber music at the Royal Danish Academy.
    In May 2002 he won the Jacob Gade Violin Competition, and in June 2008 he was a semifinalist in the Eighth International Carl Nielsen Violin Competition in Odense (Denmark), as well as winner of the special prize for best interpretation of Carl Nielsen’s works. He has appeared as soloist with several major Danish orchestras, including the Aarhus Symphony Orchestra, the Odense Symphony Orchestra, the Copenhagen Philharmonic, and The Royal Danish Academy´s Symphony Orchestra, among others.
    As an active folk musician, Mr. Sørensen has played for years with the Danish group Zar, and has performed at several festivals both in Denmark and internationally.  Together with two other folk musicians, Nikolaj Busk and Ale Carr, he is part of the trio Dreamers Circus.  His discography also includes a 2009 recording of ”Bel Canto” by Poul Ruders for Bridge Records.
Frederik Øland, violin, was born in 1984 and has played the violin since he was five years old. He completed his A-levels from Sankt Annæ Gymnasium, Copenhagen School of Music.  He was taught by Elizabeth Zeuthen Schneider and Serguei Azizian, and studies now at the Royal Danish Academy of Music under Professor Sergej Azizjan. 
    In 2002 Mr. Øland won first prize as well as the prize for best performance at the Jacob Gade Violin Contest. He has also won several first prizes at the Classical Music Contests of the Berlingske Tidende.  Mr. Øland has performed as a soloist with a number of amateur symphony orchestras, and in the autumn of 2003 he toured Italy with the Copenhagen Symphony Orchestra as soloist of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto.
Asbjørn Nørgaard, viola, was born in 1984 and began playing violin with  Suzuki teacher Jan Mathiesen at the age of six. He has since received education from Professor Tutter Givskov at the Jutland Conservatory of Music, and from Sakari Tepponen at the West Jutland Conservatory of Music.  He has also been taught by Igor Ozim in Cologne, and in Vienna by Siegfried Führlinger and Hans Peter Ochsenhofer. In 2003 Mr. Nørgaard was admitted with top grades to the Royal Danish Academy of Music as a violin student, but obtained a dispensation to change to the viola – an instrument he had been playing for several years along with the violin.  Mr.  Nørgaard is currently studying with the Brazilian violist Rafael Altino. Along the way he has received several prizes and scholarships, and has performed Mozart’s “Sinfonia Concertante” with orchestra.
Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin, cello, was born in 1982 and completed his studies at the Edsberg Institute of Music in Stockholm with concerts at Stockholm Concert Hall in 2007, and as soloist with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra in April 2008. He was an INTRO-classical artist in Norway in 2008-2010; this is a prestigious program run by the Norwegian Concert Institute. Mr. Sjölin has worked as principal cellist in the Trondheim Symphony Orchestra and the Australian Chamber Orchestra. 

Program Notes

□   SCHUBERT
Quartettsatz in C Minor, D. 703
Schubert’s youthful appetite for chamber music—he was barely thirteen years old when he wrote his first string quartet—was nourished by the happy circumstance of having a family quartet under his own roof. His brother Ferdinand fondly recalled the “uncommon pleasure” of playing first violin to young Franz’s viola, while their brother Ignaz and their father rounded out the ensemble. Yet there was no question about who was in charge: “Whenever a mistake was made, were it ever so small, Franz would look the guilty one in the face, either seriously or sometimes with a smile; if Papa, who played the cello, was in the wrong, he would say nothing at first, but if the mistake was repeated, he would say quite shyly and smilingly: ‘Sir, there must be a mistake somewhere!,’ and our good father would gladly be taught by him.”   
    The comparatively modest demands made by the dozen or so string quartets that Schubert wrote in his teenage years presumably strained neither his father’s instrumental technique nor domestic harmony. But when the composer returned to the quartet medium in December 1820, after a hiatus of some four years, his musical language had evolved far beyond the capacities of the average amateur musician. Indeed, Schubert himself seems to have been somewhat overwhelmed by his newfound range and intensity of expression. After completing the first movement of his C-Minor quartet and drafting some 40 bars of a slow movement in A-flat Major, he either set the score aside temporarily or abandoned it altogether. The Quartettsatz (which, in translation, means Quartet Movement) remained a tantalizing introduction to what would have been Schubert’s twelfth string quartet; it remained unpublished until more than four decades after his death.
    Even today, the untamed dramatic power of Schubert’s music is profoundly unsettling. Like Beethoven, he felt driven to push vigorously against the constraints of the classical style that had defined his earlier quartets. The Quartettsatz observes the conventional classical proprieties with its two complementary themes in dark, dim C Minor and burnished A-flat Major, and the pleasing symmetry of its mirror-like halves; but the shifting chromaticism of the middle development section eliminates a clear sense of an audible home key and tonal balance. Rhythmically the music simmers with a repressed, pulsating energy that periodically explodes but never quite comes to a full boil.
    The other compositions which Schubert began during 1820 were similarly abandoned, for the artist was experiencing a severe identity crisis at the time. Nevertheless, the Quartettsatz was the forerunner of the late string quartets for which Schubert is best remembered. Four years after the Quartettsatz Schubert returned to the genre to write the Rosamunde Quartet, which was followed by Death and the Maiden and the Fifteenth. The Quartettsatz received its posthumous premiere on March 1, 1867, in Vienna.
□   MOZART
String Quartet in C Major, K. 465
The C-Major quartet is the last of the six “Haydn Quartets” that Mozart presented to his revered mentor with the dedication: “Your good opinion encourages me to offer these to you and leads me to hope that you will not consider them wholly unworthy of your favor.” Haydn had expressed his good opinion after attending a private performance of the quartets in Vienna in February 1785, when he famously remarked to Mozart’s father that “your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name.”
    Haydn’s unreserved approbation reportedly did not extend to the harmonically unorthodox prelude that gives the C-Major quartet its nickname of “dissonance.” This nickname stems from the opening 22 measures that offended eighteenth-century sensibility. Although the harmonic tension sounds mild enough to modern ears, the opening Adagio was sufficiently abrasive to listeners to provoke one critic to attack the passage as “barbarous,” while audiences insisted that they heard wrong notes. Some players asked the publisher for corrected scores, while others went so far as to recompose the first few bars of the quartet, in a sincere attempt to correct Mozart’s “mistakes.” Reportedly, Haydn commented: “Well, if Mozart wrote it, he must have meant it.” All of this merely points to the inventive and groundbreaking quality of the Haydn quartets and, in particular, to the “Dissonance” or “Dissonant” quartet, as it was called.
    As Haydn’s biographer Hermann Abert observed, “An age that saw in Mozart only an out-and-out optimist simply did not know where to begin with this adagio. But the Mozart with whom we are dealing here was anything but an optimist … The idea that finds expression here is not merely that of a storm that blows over and cleans the air. Rather, it is the basic mood of the work as a whole, the image of a mind weighed down by gloomy forebodings and attempting to come to terms with the emotional pressure that it feels.”
    Many listeners would agree that an undercurrent of foreboding flows beneath much of the quartet’s sunny surface. This angst can be felt in the ambiguous and frequently elusive tonality, in the restless thematic material, and in the wide, angular melodic leaps that characterize the last two movements. Against all of this must be counted the serene equanimity of the first-movement Allegro; the relaxed, aria-like, rapturous lyricism of the Andante cantabile; and the irrepressible playfulness of the final Allegro molto. Mozart’s genius was capacious; as arresting as they may be, the first 22 bars of the C-Major quartet are far from the whole story.
□  NIELSEN
String Quartet in G Minor, op. 13, FS 4
Nielsen's father was a house painter by profession, but he spent as much or more energy on his secondary activities as a violinist, and it was in this way that his son Carl, the seventh of twelve children, received his first musical instruction. Nielsen learned the violin and piano as a child, and wrote his earliest compositions at the age of eight or nine: a lullaby, now lost, and a polka which the composer notated in his autobiography. He also learned informally how to play brass instruments, which led, at the age of fourteen, to a job as a bugler and alto trombonist in the 16th Battalion at nearby Odense. On a subsequent visit to Copenhagen in 1883, Nielsen was introduced to composer Niels Gade, who suggested that the young musician enroll at the Conservatory for serious studies.
    During Nielsen's three years at the Conservatory, his primary subjects were violin and theory, and at no time did he actually receive formal instruction in composition. Nevertheless, his Suite for Strings made a highly successful debut at Tivoli Hall on September 8, 1888. Nielsen would designate this work his Opus 1.
    In 1889 Nielsen was hired as a violinist at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, a position he retained until 1905, when jealousies eased him out. During the 1890’s he composed prolifically, so that by 1903 he had signed a contract with the Wilhelm Hansen publishing firm, which paid him an annual retainer.
    Now, however, there was a growing demand for his services as a conductor, particularly of his own works, and in 1908 he succeeded Johan Svendsen as conductor at the Royal Theatre, a post he held until 1914. His growing international reputation, particularly through his symphonies, led to invitations to conduct abroad, while at home he took a leading part in the musical life of Denmark, teaching at the Copenhagen Conservatory and later joining the governing body of that institution. 
    Nielsen suffered a serious heart attack in 1925, and from then on he was forced to curtail much of his activity, although he continued to compose until his death. During this later period he wrote a delightful memoir of his childhood called My Childhood on Funen (1927) and produced a short book of essays entitled Living Music (1925). Both have been translated into English. He died in Copenhagen in 1931.
    Nielsen's music is highly individual in both content and construction, although only his symphonies and three concertos have earned regular places in the repertory outside Denmark, where many of his choral pieces have become part of the national heritage.
    However, Nielsen's string quartets are coming to be regarded as some of the most important chamber music of the late nineteenth century. This String Quartet in G Minor, opus 13, was written in 1887-88 and substantially revised in 1900. It was first performed on February 3, 1898, ten years after its composition, and was published in 1900 with a dedication to Johan Svendsen. It has all of the restless youthful energy of Nielsen's first symphonies, along with a typically tender slow movement and a witty and brooding scherzo, which admirers of his symphonies will recognize as Nielsen trademarks. The quartet seems to have an endless stream of good melodies and clever uses for them. If the string quartet is one of the hardest mediums to write for, it is remarkable how adept this largely self-taught composer was, so early in his career, at meeting the challenge. Nielsen’s are fully idiomatic quartets that sound as natural to the medium as Mozart's or Mendelssohn's.
    In addition to his symphonies and string quartets, Nielsen left two operas, concertos for violin, for flute, and for clarinet, as well as a number of other orchestral and choral works. He also composed a wind quintet, which enjoys continued popularity, three violin sonatas, a string quintet, and a small quantity of music for the piano and the organ.
    Carl Nielsen appears on the Danish one-hundred kroner note -- an indication of the esteem in which he is held in his home country.