Thoughts Provoked by Danish String Quartet

Thoughts Provoked by the Danish String Quartet

In recitals as part of the

Tuckamore Festival of Chamber Music

St. John’s, NL, August 2018

St. John’s audiences had two opportunites to experience the artistry of this youthful quartet: the first, a performance in St. Andrew’s Church (The Kirk) on Tuesday 14 August; the second, during the “Blissfuly Beethoven” concert at D.F.Cook Recital Hall at Memorial University’s School of Music.

I won’t attempt a traditional review – it’s really beyond my competence – but I was struck by their approach to compositions from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and offer the following thoughts.

For the past forty years or more, some orchestras and smaller ensembles have taken the route of attempting to re-create the sound that was likely produced at the time of the original composition. Taffel Music in Toronto has had great commercial success in offering lightly textured orchestral formations – mainly strings, minimal woodwinds and percussion, no brass – and focussing their repertoire to suit. In Europe, the Orchestra of the Enlightenment, the Orchestra of St.Martin-in-the-Fields, and others have gone a little further by choosing, wherever possible, to play on authentic period instruments. “Authentic” seems to have been the operative word, as the choice of tempo and even intonation (some groups eschewed the standard A440 tuning) to give modern audiences an out-of-the-past experience.

Alongside these approaches, traditional interpretations continued, some relying on genealogy – which performer in the past had created the best practice and passed it on, through several generations of teacher-pupil relations, to the present day. The aim has been to give to audiences established interpretations, polished by pedigree instruments, responding to the desire for high-fidelity sound.

And then there is the DSQ. No mention of period instruments or genealogically transmitted interpretation. Rather, they approach each work in the spirit of youthful exploration, wanting to display for our appreciation what is going on “under the hood”. I am reminded of those exploded diagrams of cars that show in detail how each part is constructed, and how each part connects to all the others. In literary criticism it would be called “deconstruction”, so that while maintaining the integrity of the work, they highlight through their choice of tempo, the relative volume of the four instruments exaggerated to bring out the dominant voice, and even the overall dynamics – their fortes are stronger, their pianissimos quieter – the whole drawn together into an aesthetic completeness that enhances the audience’s understanding and enjoyment.

For me, the result was that, rather than listening through the music to some beyond – a theme, a biographical detail, a landscape – I was drawn ever more tightly into the music itself. In linguistic terms, the focus becomes the signifier, not the signified. And so it was that Haydn, Mendelssohn, Beethoven magically became my contemporaries, as modern to me as Hans Abrahansen’s String Quartet No.1, the central piece of the Kirk recital. And is this the bright future of chamber music? I certainly hope so! And I think I caught a glimpse of that during the Young Artists’ Lunchtime Recital at the Kirk on Thursday. Raina Saunders, violin, Charlotte Tyhurst, ‘cello, and Iris Hung, piano, played the Adagio movement from Brahms’ Piano Trio No.1 in B Major, Op.8. Their choice of tempo was closer to Largo, but the performance never dragged. Rather it was enchanting to listen to the composer’s construction of changing cadences, from cordance, to discordance, and back again. The audience was given time to understand how the phrases fitted together as our focus followed the three intersecting lines, creating a texture that a quicker tempo would have blurred. Had this trio received coaching from DSQ? Or had they quickly absorbed what they had heard the previous evening, and immediately set about infoming their own practice?

Tony Chadwick