Going with the flow

Since making their teenage debut in 2002, the musicians of the Danish Quartet have risen to the pinnacle of their profession but have never lost their expansive sense of wonder. Andrew Mellor talks to the foursome as they embark on their 20th-anniversary season

The Danish Quartet (l–r) Frederik Øland, Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen, Asbjørn Nørgaard and Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin

MAIN PHOTO CAROLINE BITTENCOURT. 2002 PHOTO COURTESY OF THE QUARTET

It was an unusually hot afternoon in Copenhagen in July 2002 when four adolescent boys hurtled on to a stage at the Charlottenborg gallery to present themselves as a new string quartet. ‘Our coach told us to walk on stage quickly,’ remembers one of them. In fact, the velocity of their entrance became one of the concert’s unintended talking points. ‘It was like we really needed to show some authority,’ says another of the four with a laugh. ‘“Here we are!” We certainly took that advice literally.’ 

This was the debut of what called itself the Young Danish String Quartet, ‘young’ being the operative word. Three of the four had yet to enrol at a conservatoire. They knew each other from summer courses and football kickabouts – agroup of teenagers discovering, in tandem, a burgeoning passion for playing music written many decades before they were born; four kids caught in the slipstream of an esoteric tradition considered the preserve of far older, more serious and more experienced musicians.

‘My mum just sent me this,’ says violist Asbjørn Nørgaard, proffering his phone, which displays a photo of the occasion: four red-faced lads in sweat-patched white shirts. ‘It felt like Carnegie Hall to us,’ he says. ‘We took it so seriously, writing our biographies in the formal style even though there was nothing to put in them. Very cute! I remember Rune [Tonsgaard Sørensen, violinist] leaning over to me just before we went on stage and asking me if I ever got nervous. “No, I never get nervous,” I said, though of course I got super nervous. He looked at me and just said: “Good. It’s good to have someone who doesn’t get nervous.”’

The wonder of the Danish Quartet is how little has really changed. They still appear ‘young’ but have long since dropped the word from their name – and are all fathers. These days, the venue might really be Carnegie Hall. The schoolboy white shirts have gone and the tempo of the stage entry has calmed. But in its 20th season (2022–3), the Danish Quartet is somehow still just four guys going with the flow of their exceptional talent. Different levels of refinement and connective imagination have altered everything while apparently altering nothing.

The Danish Quartet at its 2002 debut (with cellist Carl-Oscar Østerlind)

CAR0LINE BITTENCOURT

We meet in the quartet’s lair, a workshop in the bowels of the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen – alandmark Functionalist building that once headquartered Danish state radio. The group has been quartet-in-residence at the academy since 2015, an arrangement that involves plenteous performing and teaching while giving the ensemble the luxury of a bolthole in the city.

The atmosphere is unashamedly man cave. ‘You want a beer?’ asks violinist Frederik Øland, gesturing towards a crate of Pilsners on top of a Steinway as I’m ushered into the room (it’s 10am, so no thanks). Nørgaard more fittingly plunges the filter down on a fresh pot of coffee as his colleagues gravitate on to three of four chairs that replicate their stage formation. When they’re all seated, Norwegian cellist Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin, who replaced Carl-Oscar Østerlind in 2008, is to my right; Sørensen is on the left, with Øland to his left and Nørgaard to his. A Persian-style rug lines the floor underneath them. On a wall hangs The Strad’s 2022 calendar.

Anyone who owns that calendar is likely to know something of the Danish Quartet’s trajectory. Early victories at competitions in Trondheim and London alerted the wider world to its existence, while stints on the BBC New Generation Artists scheme and the Lincoln Center’s Bowers Program sealed its reputation. Just as the ensemble was pricking up ears with its extreme clarity of articulation and supremely considered blend, it punctured its classical bubble by recording folk music. It enjoys a residency at Wigmore Hall while curating its own genrebending festival in Copenhagen. Its latest recording project, Prism, a series of discs for ECM each linking a Bach fugue with a Beethoven string quartet and a later work (often modernist), has been vigorously discussed and highly acclaimed. (The latest, and final, release in the series, Prism V, is out this month.)

‘WE WERE AMBITIOUS IN THE WAY WE PREPARED, BUT NOT ABOUT WHERE WE WANTED TO BE’

Was any of this part of the plan in 2002? ‘We weren’t thinking like that,’ says Øland. ‘We were ambitious in the way we prepared, but not about where we wanted to be.’ Were there milestones, at least? Sjölin uses a different word: corners. ‘Every time we turned a corner, it was the result of something that had already happened. We did well in the first competitions because we’d played the programme twenty times. It wasn’t the victories that counted. It was how we worked for them.’ Øland picks up: ‘We never went to a competition to win. We went to get experience, to build repertoire, to travel a bit – to enjoy each other’s company.’

The same stimuli sustain them two decades on, they claim. This is a group whose personal bonds have always had musical implications (Øland describes his fellow players as ‘brothers’). Sjölin recounts the story of one competition in particular, when Sørensen left the full score of Thomas Adès’s Arcadiana on a plane. ‘That’s when we really learnt how to listen to each other,’ the cellist says. ‘I would say that the most important tool we have as a quartet is that we’ve become very specialised at listening to each other – it’s something that, if I may say, we’re particularly good at.’

The quartet at Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center during its Beethoven cycle in 2019

TRISTAN COOK

His claim leads to a discussion of the group’s trademark sound: a blend of such distilled purity that it can work even at minuscule dynamics, coupled to intense unity of ensemble, the four players seemingly bound like schooling fish. ‘We used to vibrate more and we used to swing much more in and out of tempo,’ says Nørgaard, ‘but we never made decisions about any of this. It was always based on a long listening process. Other people noticed which one of us was vibrating and which one was not. For us it was about feeling what sounded right.’ The journey to this sound, they say, is one they consistently struggle to explain to students. Øland returns, time and again, to the subconscious: ‘Our ears changed. Simple. I used to be the romantically inclined one, playing with lots of vibrato. That was my upbringing. But we gathered around a sound. It happened without us noticing – certainly without me noticing.’

The 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard observed that life must be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards. In retrospect, it seems logical that the search for a purer, more natural sound would be turbocharged by the group’s interest in folk music (spearheaded by Sørensen). And that folk music, in turn, would lead the group from the dense spiritual bracken of Beethoven’s chamber music into the aerated plateau of Schubert’s. They are pairing the composer’s last three quartets and string quintet with four specially commissioned ‘partner’ works (by Adès, Bent Sørensen, Anna Thorvaldsdottir and Lotta Wennäkoski) for their continuing Doppelgänger series, which is touring in spring 2023.

‘IN BEETHOV EN THERE ARE SO MANY OBSTACLES. SCHUBERT’S IS A NATUR AL BEAUTY. HE IS FAR CLOSER TO FOLK MUSIC’

Schubert has clearly refreshed the ensemble after a ten-year Beethoven cycle in which brilliance was apparently stalked by frustration. ‘We were climbing the Beethoven mountain for a decade…’ says Nørgaard, before Sørensen finishes his sentence with a laugh: ‘and Schubert has liberated us from it!’ Sørensen continues: ‘In Beethoven there are so many obstacles. It’s so full of tension that I got a little fed up with it. Schubert’s is a natural beauty. He is far closer to folk music; more organic, more liberating, more satisfying to play. And he touches me more deeply.’

Nørgaard describes Schubert’s chamber works for strings as ‘musicians’ music’. The composer ‘creates a canvas’, he says, ‘and you have to engage in it as an artist, to swim around in it. You can’t just chill. You need to be telling a story all the time.’ It came at the right time, says Øland, ‘because we’re a little bit more at peace with our music making. It doesn’t feel like we’re trying to prove anything with Schubert, we’re just in it – and relaxing in it.’

Those statements reveal a contradiction in these four individuals’ idea of this music, and there’s clearly a dichotomy between the detail and delicacy of the sound they make in Schubert and the idea that they kick back while playing it. Nørgaard contextualises it: ‘When we did the Schubert G major Quartet, an esteemed musician analysed what we did in the second movement in loads of detail: “You did a tiny crescendo here, a hairpin there, then a little comma…” I had no idea we did all that. I mean, can you imagine how stressful it would be to endure 60 minutes of that sort of musical accountancy?’

For the Danish Quartet, music making is both about an ongoing process and being in the moment

CAROLINE BITTENCOURT

Even more than Beethoven, says Nørgaard, Schubert lives and dies by listening. That comes with its own meta-challenges. ‘When we’re playing Schubert, I dream about it,’ says Sjölin. ‘I think about the themes in the shower. It’s constantly with you, and that is hard. I mean, if you just make a ton of decisions about how to play something, then it’s easier to go home and leave it all behind – you make dinner and see your kids and everything’s fine. But this way, when you are constantly searching, it actually takes its toll.’

Of the four Scandinavians, Nørgaard speaks with the deepest voice – adefault sense of authority possibly lined with rawness (he is nursing two sprained ankles when we meet, one leg propped up on a piano stool). Øland seems the most boyish and polite, Sørensen sensible but steely. Sjölin speaks the least, but with the most simmering passion. Like their playing, the clarity of thought and descriptive sensitivity of each musician – the lightly worn intellect – is remarkable. They have the wisdom to know how little PR will count for, in the end.

And they want to talk, they want to reveal themselves – apparently as much for their own creative sustenance and introspection as for my tape recorder. I raise the process of preparing a score, but even that seems anathematic to them. ‘That process is going on in the concert,’ says Nørgaard, bluntly. ‘The music is never ready. This idea that you practise in a box and then present a perfect cake for the audience went in the trash can 15 years ago. We start work and at some point we continue that work in front of an audience. And the audience feels it – they feel that we’re searching for something rather than hitting markers and colours we’ve already decided on.’ Øland, who has a habit of affixing neat verbal codas on to what colleagues have just said, picks up: ‘It’s the process that’s interesting. And that’s what’s both super frustrating and really, really wonderful about our craft. We never get to a result.’

What you do get more of, says Sjölin, are ‘those musical moments that arrive like gifts – that you can’t really force, but you always hope will come. Maybe I had a stage in my life when I took this whole existence for granted. Maybe when you’re more grateful for what you do, it’s easier to receive these gifts, these great moments.’ Nørgaard takes up the theme: ‘It’s not necessarily the summit of a movement. It might just be hitting one chord super nice with the second violin – and nobody in the hall notices, but you’re thinking, “Yeah, that felt good.”’ He refers to Timothy Gallwey’s book The Inner Game of Tennis, which expands the metaphor of the tennis player who has the creative discipline not to rejoice in overt success, nor to be frustrated by overt failure, but rather observes all with equal openness. It is, says Nørgaard, ‘literally easier to nail those hard shifts when you are not constantly evaluating your performance’.

What about their perspective on their own playing style in a broader context: can they recognise it as being ‘of its time’ – of the 2020s? ‘It’s a third wave going back to Harnoncourt,’ says Nørgaard. ‘That revolution in the 1980s didn’t really reach the quartet world because the Amadeus Quartet was still teaching. Then Leonidas Kavakos came along with this very pure sound, and we listened a lot to the Artemis Quartet – that regally pure sound, which, yes, is how you might describe us and the Doric and some others playing today. Perhaps when we look back in 20 years we’ll say, “OK, it got a bit fast sometimes. It lost a bit of the soul.”’

The sound, counters Sjölin, comes less from notions of tonal purity than from personal equality. ‘The thing about the Amadeus Quartet is that Norbert Brainin was very much the leader and even sounded a little vulgar compared with the others, who actually didn’t vibrate that much. Today, the roles are just evened out more, which gives the impression that we’re not vibrating that much; I actually think we do vibrate, it’s just not as obvious. And by the way, if you took that idea of a hierarchy into any human relationship, a friendship or a romantic relationship or whatever, it just wouldn’t work.’

CAROLINE BITTENCOURT

‘I HOPE THAT WHAT WE CAN GIVE THE NEXT GENER ATION IS THE CALMNESS TO KNOW THAT YOU CAN BE YOURSELF AND STILL MAKE IT TO CARNEGIE HALL’

Even as teenagers, the debutants of the Young Danish String Quartet were conscious of the weight of that name. The moniker ‘Danish Quartet’ has passed down generations of players, through the ensemble led by Arne Svendsen (1949–83) and that established in 1985 by their own coach, Tim Frederiksen (whose father, Knud, played in Svendsen’s ensemble). No matter how many more years this Danish Quartet keeps playing, a major anniversary can’t help but prompt thoughts of impact and legacy. We talk of the new sound ideals propagated by the likes of Patricia Kopatchinskaja. But the group is reluctant to align itself with any parallel shift in quartet playing. ‘It’s different for soloists,’ says Sjölin. ‘These people are going to the extremes of their own mind. If four people tried to do that, it would sound constructed.’

‘We’ve never tried to be pioneers, actually,’ suggests Øland. ‘But perhaps you can be pioneers in different ways. I hope and believe that we have helped develop the idea of what a string quartet can be. There are kids all over the world playing our folk-song arrangements, and on all sorts of instruments.’

We discuss the ensemble’s free-form concert season at the academy, Series of Four, and its cross-disciplinary DSQ Festival, just a few weeks away at the time we speak in October 2022. On the menu is Ligeti’s Poème symphonique (the piece for 100 metronomes) and String Quartet no.2, as well as performances with the songwriter Gabriel Kahane and madrigals by Marenzio from chamber choir Musica Ficta. ‘We hope that when people come to our concerts they never quite know what they’re going to experience, what story we will tell, what weird constellations we will come up with,’ says Øland.

The difference, believes Nørgaard, is that these days a world-leading quartet can do those things. ‘We play at Carnegie Hall but we also do folk music, perform with actors and so on. When we started out, the quartets that did that stuff were the ones who sucked, that couldn’t deal with the competition. I hope that what we can give the next generation is the calmness to know that you can be yourself and still make it to Carnegie Hall.’ In that sense, have they lived up to the Danish Quartet name? ‘Sorry,’ says Nørgaard, ‘but yes: I think we have.’