by Kevin McLaughlin
There’s an old adage about the Danes: they are an amiable people, quick to embrace hygge and humor, yet they hide a deep streak of seriousness when it matters. The Danish String Quartet has made a career out of embodying that balance. Their concerts feel open-hearted, even playful, but the music-making is etched with an intensity as real as an icy wind — one they would probably shrug off if you asked them about it later.
On Friday evening, November 21, in Oberlin’s Finney Chapel, three Danes (Frederik Øland & Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen, violins and Asbjørn Nørgaard, viola) and a Norwegian (Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin, cello) using, in their words, “four simple instruments made of wood” brought ease and gravity to a program that moved from Stravinsky and Jonny Greenwood to late Beethoven and to the folk traditions of their northern homes.
Their spoken introductions were casual in the best way: well-crafted, low-key, and quietly funny. In introducing the first half, Sørensen introduced Stravinsky’s Three Pieces and Jonny Greenwood’s Suite from There Will Be Blood, followed by the Beethoven, as if that were the most natural sequence in the world.
Interleaving the Stravinsky with the Greenwood, set the abrupt edges of Stravinsky against Greenwood’s atmospheric film music, soaked in tension and dusky harmonies. The composers and their idioms are decades apart, but the Danish players applied the same folk-tinged ethos and rhythmic spring to both. The result was a single, continuous suite that left listeners sorting out which movement belonged to which composer. Stravinsky’s angular miniatures wandered into Greenwood’s desolate landscapes, and both seemed entirely at home.
Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 16 in F major, Op. 135 revealed the Scandinavians’ soul. It is farewell-music — Beethoven’s final quartet — but the players avoided heaviness. Their phrasing was supple, the tempos fleet, and the humor in the outer movements genuinely light, suggesting a composer looking back with clarity rather than sorrow. And in the finale, Beethoven answers his own question — “Muss es sein?” (Must it be?) — with a lively, cheerful, “Es muss sein.”
The soul of the work lies in the third movement Lento, where the Quartet hovered in some other realm with soft-toned understatement. The sound was centered but pale, not fragile but otherworldly, and the lines flowed with a vocal simplicity. It was deeply moving without being performative — precisely that Danish blend of warmth and inner-directedness.
“You don’t own a folk tune, you simply borrow it for a while,” the DSQ writes in their program note for the second half — and they did so beautifully in a set of Nordic songs and dances from the Faroe Islands, Norway, and Sweden. The selections spanned myths and dance tunes from tales with the ancient, wind-blown feeling of the Nibelungenlied to reels and hallings, a Norwegian dance whose main event is kicking a hat or object off a stick. What unified them was the sheer joy of the DSQ’s playing: earthy, physical, mostly fast, yet always marked by the quartet’s characteristic finesse.
A request arrived on a printout that violinist Frederik Øland read aloud, and in their easygoing way they happily obliged with a track from their new folk album, Keel Road. For dessert, they offered a beautiful arrangement of Danny Boy, played with earnestness and disarming modesty.
Published on ClevelandClassical.com November 25, 2025
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