Danish String Quartet

Danish String Quartet
Fri, Apr 21, 7:30 p.m.
Kennedy Center Terrace Theater

A hands-down Washington Performing Arts audience favorite, the Danish String Quartet members are rightly hailed both for their sterling technique and their adventurous approach to programming. Of a 2018 Washington Performing Arts performance, the Washington Post wrote, “They play with a cohesion, finesse, and precision second to none. Having built a solid reputation in the standard quartet repertory, recently they’ve turned their attention to Nordic folk music. The enthusiastic and vocal audience that packed the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue seemed glad they have.”

For this Terrace Theater performance, the DSQ present a very different yet no less intriguing program, juxtaposing classic works by Schubert—the beloved “Rosamunde” quartet and a quartet arrangement of the lied “Gretchen Am Spinnrade” (“Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel”)—with a new work co-commissioned by Washington Performing Arts from the esteemed contemporary Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir. Of the previous quartet we co-commissioned from Ms. Thorvaldsdottir, Enigma, the New York Times wrote, “[Enigma] resembles dispatches emerging from the white noise of another world. It’s a masterly entrance to the genre, and a deceptively vast soundscape conjured with just four acoustic instruments.”

This performance is an external rental presented in coordination with the Kennedy Center Campus Rentals Office and is not produced by the Kennedy Center.