Danish String Quartet

The Grammy-nominated Danish String Quartet continues to assert its preeminence among the world’s finest string quartets. Celebrated for its “intense blend, extreme dynamic variation (in which the members seem glued together), perfect intonation even on harmonics, and constant vitality and flow” (Gramophone) and renowned for the palpable joy they exude in music-making, the Danish String Quartet has become one of today’s most in-demand classical quartets, performing to sold-out concert halls around the world. The Danish Quartet celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2022–2023, having formed when violinists Frederik Øland and Rune Tonsgaard Sørenson and violist Asbjørn Nørgaard were teenagers under the mentorship of Tim Frederiksen of Copenhagen’s Royal Danish Academy of Music. In 2008, the three Danes were joined by Norwegian cellist Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin.

The Danish Quartet’s inventive and intriguing programming and repertoire choices have produced critically acclaimed original projects and commissions as well as popular arrangements of Scandinavian folk music. This season, the quartet completes its Doppelgänger Project, an ambitious four-year international commissioning project pairing world premieres from four composers—Bent Sørensen, Lotta Wennäkoski, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, and Thomas Adès—with late major chamber works by Schubert. Each season, the quartet has performed a world premiere on a program with its Doppelgänger—the Schubert quartet or quintet that inspired it—culminating this eveing in the premiere of a new quintet by Adès, after the String Quintet in C Major. The Doppelgänger pieces are commissioned by the Danish String Quartet with the support of Cal Performances, Carnegie Hall, UC Santa aBarbara Arts & Lectures, Vancouver Recital Society, Flagey in Brussels, and the Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam.

Last summer, the quartet performed at Ravinia and at Tanglewood’s Seiji Ozawa Hall. The 2023–2024 season sees them on tour in 18 cities in the USA and Canada and venues in Norway, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, Brussels, Italy, and their home of Denmark.

The Danish String Quartet’s most recent recording project is PRISM, a series of five discs on ECM New Series that explores the symbiotic musical and contextual relationships between Bach fugues, Beethoven string quartets, and works by Shostakovich, Schnittke, Bartók, Mendelssohn, and Webern. The final disc, PRISM V, was released to great acclaim last spring, with The Strad praising the quartet’s “refined, coherent and erudite performances, which combine an exhilarating sweep with minute attention to details of phrasing and timbre.” The quartet’s discography reflects the ensemble’s special affinity for Scandinavian composers, with the complete quartets of Carl Nielsen (Dacapo, 2007 and 2008) and Adès, Nørgård, and Abrahamsen (their debut on ECM in 2016). They also released two discs of traditional Scandinavian folk music, Wood Works (Dacapo 2014) and Last Leaf (ECM 2017), which was chosen as one of the top classical albums of the year by NPR, Spotify, and the New York Times.

The quartet takes an active role in reaching new audiences through special projects. In 2007, they established the DSQ Festival, which takes place in intimate and informal settings in Copenhagen. In 2016, they inaugurated a concert series, Series of Four, in which they both perform and invite colleagues to appear.

The Danish String Quartet has been the recipient of many awards and appointments, including Musical America’s 2020 Ensemble of the Year and the Borletti-Buitoni Trust. The quartet was named in 2013 as a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist and appointed to the Bowers Program (formerly CMS Two). The Quartet was awarded the 2010 NORDMETALL-Ensemble Prize at the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Festival in Germany, and, in 2011, received the Carl Nielsen Prize, the highest cultural honor in Denmark.