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Artist: Danish String Quartet
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Danish String Quartet:

Keel Road

Keel Road is the latest chapter in the Danish String Quartet’s reckoning with music from – or inspired by – northern folk and traditional sources, rounding off a decade of sustained engagement with the genre. Wood Works, issued in 2014 on the Danish Dacapo label gave notice of the extent of the DSQ’s commitment to folk, explored in parallel with their classical activities, and Last Leaf, released in 2017 on ECM New Series took the story further. A resounding success with press and public, Last Leaf ranked high amongst albums of the year at NPR, The New York Times and Gramophone, the latter magazine suggesting this might be “the best album of folk ditties from a string quartet you’ll ever hear”, an assertion now challenged by Keel Road. 

Once again, the group casts its associative net wide: “We set out on a musical journey that traverses the North Sea. For centuries, the main communication channel of Northern Europe, the highway and the internet of bygone eras. And even though known for its swift upsurges and strong gales, brave sailors would again and again travel the keel road, enabling a continuous exchange of goods, culture and music. The musical keel road of this album will take us from Denmark and Norway to shores far away: to the Faroe Islands, to Ireland and England.” The journey illuminates musical affinities as well as distinctions. “While folk music represents local traditions and local stories, it is also the music of everywhere and everyone. At the end of the day, our stories and our music remain closely connected.

Danish String Quartet:

Prism IV

This is the Danish String Quartet’s fourth instalment in the Prism series, the group’s ongoing project that will ultimately hold five volumes of recordings linking Bach fugues with Beethoven quartets and quartets by alternating later composers. While the preceding volumes presented quartets by masters who lived to experience the 20th century – these being, in order of their appearance in the series: Dmitri Shostakovich, Alfred Schnittke and Béla Bartók – Prism IV finds the Danish musicians interpreting Felix Mendelssohn’s (1809-1847) String Quartet No.2. As Paul Griffiths remarks in the liner notes, the quartet’s interpretation of Mendelssohn is empowered by Beethoven’s model in terms of “vivid gesture, contrapuntal energy, harmonic boldness and formal innovation”. The piece is paired with Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 15 and Bach’s Fugue in G minor in the arrangement of the Austrian educator and composer Emanuel Aloys Förster.

Danish String Quartet:

Prism III - Beethoven / Bartok / Bach

This is the third volume of the Danish String Quartet's ongoing Prism series, which shows how the radiance of Bach's fugues is refracted through Beethoven's quartets to illuminate the work of later composers.  "Beethoven had taken a fundamentally linear development from Bach," the Danes note, "and exploded everything into myriads of different colours, directions and opportunities – much in the same way as a prism splits a beam of light. We hope the listener will join us in the wonder of these beams of music that travel all the way from Bach through Beethoven as far as to our own times." Here the quartet follows the beam from Johann Sebastian Bach's Fugue in c-sharp minor through Ludwig van Beethoven's String Quartet no.14, op. 131 to Béla Bartók's String Quartet No.1.  

Danish String Quartet:

Prism II - Beethoven / Schnittke / Bach

Each of the albums in the 's ongoing Prism project links one of the five late Beethoven quartets with a Bach fugue and a kindred-spirit work by a later master. Released last year, the Grammy-nominated first instalment of the series earned wide acclaim. The second volume of the series begins with the Fugue in B minor, BWV 869, which completes J.S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I (in an arrangement by Viennese composer Emanuel Aloys Förster, an elder contemporary of Beethoven). As Prism Iincluded a quartet by Shostakovich, Prism II features one Alfred Schnittke. Characteristically, Schnittke's String Quartet No. 3 of 1983 echoes with the sound of ghosts, from the late 16th century (Orlando Lassus and his Stabat Mater) to the mid-20th century (Shostakovich and his musical monogram of DSCH – which, as Paul Griffiths points out in his booklet essay, can be sensed as a transposition of the first four notes of the theme from Beethoven's titanic "Grosse Fugue"). The original version of Beethoven's String Quartet No. 13 in B-flat Major, Op. 130, included the "Grosse Fugue" as its final movement – which is how the DSQ presents the piece on Prism II.