Danish String Quartet

Widely recognized as one of the world's greatest quartets, named Musical America's 2020 Ensemble of the Year, the Danish String Quartet returns to Durham with a program structured intriguingly.

By surrounding a Benjamin Britten piece with a pair of Mozart pieces, and then ending with the inner-voiced Schumann Opus 41, #3, they produce new contexts in which to hear the work of each of these composers. The first, lighter weight, Divertimenti of Mozart compare and contrast interestingly with the 3 Divertimenti of Britten, to which he refers as "character pieces." The Mozart quartet that follows then takes the musical conversation to a different level of complexity, both in terms of length and structure; and the Schumann piece transforms that conversation from Classical terms to the language of the Romantic. Schumann characterized the idiom of the string quartet as 'by turns beautiful and even abstrusely woven conversation among four people.' This program creates an engaging evening of conversations.