Vancouver Recital Society hosts the Danish String Quartet’s Schubert-inspired show
Concert at Orpheum Theatre the final segment in group’s four-year-long international project, Doppelgänger
SPONSORED POST BY Vancouver Recital Society
Danish String Quartet. Photo by Caroline Bittencourt
The Vancouver Recital Society is welcoming the Danish String Quartet to the Orpheum Theatre for an invigorating concert on April 16 at 3 pm.
The 2022–23 season marks the 20th anniversary of the Grammy-nominated Danish String Quartet’s formation. Their upcoming performance with the Vancouver Recital Society is the third concert in their international commissioning project, Doppelgänger.
An innovative and daring venture, Doppelgänger pairs four world premieres from four renowned contemporary composers—each piece co-commissioned by the Vancouver Recital Society—with the four major Franz Schubert works that inspired them (hence the project’s fitting name).
This time around, the Danes will pair Schubert’s String Quartet in A minor, D. 804, “Rosamunde”, with a new work by Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdóttir, one of the most original and imaginative voices of her generation.
The concert will wrap up with another Schubert piece, Gretchen am Spinnrade, Op. 2, D. 118 (lied arranged by the Danish String Quartet). Schubert was only 17 years old when he wrote the work in 1814, which has a German name that translates to “Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel”.
Currently an artist-in-residence at London’s Wigmore Hall, the Danish String Quartet is composed of violinists Frederik Øland and Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen, violist Asbjørn Nørgaard, and cellist Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin.
Øland, Sørensen, and Nørgaard met early in life, in the Danish countryside at a summer camp for enthusiastic amateur musicians. Soon afterwards they began training under professor Tim Frederiksen of The Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen, and they were on the rise as a young but serious string quartet. The Danes were joined in 2008 by the Norwegian-born Sjölin, making the group a truly Scandinavian endeavour.
The Danish String Quartet’s most recent recording project is PRISM, a five-part series that explores the symbiotic musical and contextual relationships between Bach fugues, Beethoven string quartets, and works by Shostakovich, Schnittke, Bartok, Mendelssohn, and Webern. The final instalment of the series, PRISM V, will be released on April 14.
The quartet will perform a total of 28 concerts in North America this season over the course of three separate tours.
Tickets for the Orpheum Theatre concert are available at the Vancouver Recital Society.
Post sponsored by Vancouver Recital Society.
Danish String Quartet. Photo by Caroline Bittencourt