February 22, 2026
Spivey Hall
Morrow, Georgia – USA
Danish String Quartet: Frederik ØlandRune & Tonsgaard Sørensen, violins; Asbjørn Nørgaard, viola; Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin, cello.
Alfred SCHNITTKE: String Quartet No. 2
Jonny GREENWOOD: Suite from There Will Be Blood
Maurice RAVEL: String Quartet
Mark Gresham | 25 FEB 2026
The Danish String Quartet (violinists Frederik Øland and Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen, violist Asbjørn Nørgaard, and cellist Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin) returned to Atlanta’s famed Spivey Hall on Sunday afternoon with a program that juxtaposed stark spiritual introspection, cinematic unease, and sensuous impressionist lyricism. The ensemble’s performance revealed not only its formidable technical control but also its uncommon ability to inhabit radically different musical languages without sacrificing unity of voice.
The opening of Alfred Schnittke’s String Quartet No. 2 is arresting precisely because it does almost nothing—yet every detail feels exposed and consequential. The effect depends less on obvious drama than on microscopic control of pitch, tone color, and silence.
The first austere sonic gestures appear without preparatory cues and with no conventional “theme.” Instead, the music seems to materialize out of silence, forcing the audience to recalibrate its listening. The audience becomes aware of resonance itself—the sound of the room responding to the instruments. These early lines move in small, stepwise intervals, resembling Russian Orthodox chant, with deliberate pacing and finely graded dynamics, avoiding strong tonal markers. As a result, listeners cannot easily predict where the phrase is going.
The musicians resisted the temptation to exaggerate Schnittke’s contrasts, instead allowing the music’s tension to accumulate organically. Sustained lines emerged from silence and dissolved back into it with remarkable control, highlighting the performers’ sensitivity to Spivey Hall’s intimate acoustic. When Schnittke’s music erupted into harsher dissonances, the ensemble answered with biting articulation, yet even at its most forceful, the sound never lost cohesion. The result was less a display of raw aggression than an exploration of spiritual unease.
Jonny Greenwood, known widely for his work as guitarist of the band Radiohead, has developed a compositional language that draws heavily on 20th-century avant-garde techniques, especially those associated with Krzysztof Penderecki, György Ligeti, and Olivier Messiaen. His string writing often prioritizes texture, microtonal instability, and timbral transformation over conventional melody-accompaniment hierarchy. The suite from the film There Will Be Blood is one of the clearest examples.
Greenwood’s suite shifted the program’s perspective from sacred austerity to psychological drama, and the quartet approached his music with evident affinity. They leaned into its oscillations between fragile stillness and nervous energy, capturing the sense of suspended tension that defines the score.
Here, the players demonstrated an acute awareness of texture. Whispered tremolos and glassy harmonics suggested an unsettled landscape, while repeated figures accumulated into surges of intensity. A grainy sonority underscored the music’s cinematic gravity. Rather than treating the suite as an anomaly in a classical program, the quartet integrated it seamlessly into the concert’s broader emotional arc.
After intermission, Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet provided a striking contrast. The Danish String Quartet embraced its coloristic richness from the outset, producing a warm, luminous sound that seemed to expand the hall’s intimate dimensions. Their interpretation emphasized clarity and elegance, allowing Ravel’s intricate interplay to emerge naturally.
The opening movement unfolded with fluid lyricism, its shifting meters handled with understated flexibility. The second movement’s rhythmic vitality was crisp and buoyant, the pizzicato passages executed with precision and wit. In the slow movement, the ensemble’s control of sustained tone created a sense of suspended time, while subtle dynamic inflections gave the music a quietly expressive intensity.
The finale brought the performance to an electrifying close. Rapid figurations and sharply etched accents conveyed urgency without sacrificing refinement. Each voice remained clearly defined, yet the ensemble’s collective phrasing ensured a coherent narrative trajectory.
Throughout the afternoon, the Danish String Quartet demonstrated a rare combination of intellectual rigor and expressive immediacy. Their programming illuminated unexpected connections between composers separated by decades and aesthetic outlook, while their playing revealed an ensemble capable of transforming stylistic contrasts into a unified artistic statement. In Spivey Hall’s exceptional acoustic, the effect was both intimate and deeply compelling. ■
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- Danish String Quartet: danishquartet.com
- Spivey Hall: spiveyhall.org
Read more by Mark Gresham.
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