Mining its region for musical gold, Danish String Quartet visits again

 The trimmings were in Valentine's Day red, but the precious metal on this visit by the Danish String
Quartet was the pure gold of the ensemble's arrangements of Nordic and North Atlantic folk music.

Attracting a large crowd Wednesday evening at Indiana Landmarks Center, the top-drawer  DSQ devoted its concert's second half to that growing part of its repertoire.

Danish String Quartet paid its third visit here.

There was the first appearance in its touring of the Hardanger fiddle, a Norwegian violin and a matter of intense pride. Frederik Øland played the ancient folk instrument in a generous second-half stretch of the concert. Its eight strings, four of them sympathetic (resonating to the activated four), have helped give rise to the affectionate mockery Øland summed up as Hardanger fiddlers spending half their lives tuning and the other half playing out of tune.

He got it right, however, avoiding that legendary lifelong musical task of Sisyphus.  I found especially fetching the quartet's playing of a boat song said to originate in Norwegian voyages toward the Shetland Islands in days when such sailing was a risky venture. The poignant balance in the music of a sailor's homesickness and his tenuous hope of safety reminded me of the pretty tenor song "Vallon sonore" in Berlioz's "Les Troyens." 

There was also a Swedish polka and a medieval "chain dance" from the Faeroe islands as part of a medley capped by a ballad about a blacksmith and an Irish tune. The entire second half made good on the evidence of the concert's first half that the Danish String Quartet plays as if one musician were divided four ways at the same time, no matter how much their lines diverge or come back together. And a stamp was put on that to heart-melting effect with an encore offered after a prolonged, cheering ovation: the Rodgers-Hart classic "My Funny Valentine."

In the first half, Øland and fellow violinist Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen, violist Asbjørn Nørgaard, and cellist Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin,  unfailingly projected compatible sounds, matching one another in articulation, volume, phrase shape and adjustable positions on the spectrum of tonal opacity and translucence.  (When the time has come to me to pass on, I think I want to be embalmed in the tone of Sjölin's cello.)

The concert opened with Mozart's Divertimento for String Quartet in F major. The first movement readily established the blithe atmosphere of the divertimento form, which young Wolfgang practiced expertly while he was readying his escape from Salzburg to the larger world as his own person. The Andante in the middle made a shift in its middle to the minor mode, deftly managed by the quartet and not amounting to a serious break in the carefree progress of the whole. 

A Haydnesque sense of humor proved to be a harbinger of the easygoing temperament that pervaded Benjamin Britten's three divertimenti: March, Waltz, and Burlesque. The first one unleashed the pacifist composer's knack for making fun of the military's favorite musical form, and the waltz had the malleable nature Britten exercised so well in his host of operas: the nostalgic mood swung from assertiveness to diffidence. "Burlesque" tested the DSQ's adaptability and quicksilver shift management; the music was virtually acrobatic in its well-directed quirkiness.

In between came Thomas Ades' "The Four Quarters," an examination of the divisions of the day from "Nightfalls" around the clock. The expanded techniques required suggested a day loaded with the amount of variety and whimsical thoughts that Leopold Bloom  entertained in his famous day in "Ulysses." Ades' "Nightfalls" adumbrated the changing hours' emotional atmosphere. For the next movement to be titled "Serenade: Morning Dew" suggests the substitution of a serenade in the place where an aubade might be expected. The reliance on pizzicato techniques had the dewdrops falling like the rain they imitate. 

"Days" hinted that the routine that marks most people's passing of daylight hours must be settled into and some accommodation needs to be made for all the things we cannot change. "The Twenty-fifth Hour" put the musicians through their paces in adding en extra beat to each measure, we were told, as if it were an extra hour poised for the sake of doing nothing.  Ades' willingness to keep the mood light in his quotidian salute really paid off here in a lightheartedness that the DSQ effortlessly folded into the work's technical demands.