The Danish String Quartet, Ozawa Hall, August 1, 2024 Frederik Øland and Rune Tonsgaard Sørenson, violins; Asbjørn Nørgaard, viola; and Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin, cello, with guest cellist Johannes Rostramo Franz Schubert, Quintet in C major, D. 956 Thomas Adés, “Wreath for Franz Schubert,” for String Quintet Franz Schubert, “Die Nebensonnen,” transcribed for string quintet Schubert’s C major String Quintet with two cellos is the composer’s final chamber music composition and widely regarded not only as his greatest such work, but as a kind of summa of his entire musical life’s journey. Two months after completing this hour-long musical apotheosis, he was dead.
The Quintet plumbs the heights and depths of human experience, and, along with Beethoven’s late quartets, expands the language of harmony and the dimensions of the forms he inherited from the classical period. In addition, it possesses a richness of texture unique to chamber music for strings prior to the sextets of Brahms. This summer’s performance by the Danish String Quartet (supplemented by Finnish cellist Johannes Rostamo) marks the end of a three-part series called “the Döppelgänger project” in which one of Schubert’s late chamber works is performed alongside a contemporary “response” to that work commissioned for the project.
This year the quartet commissioned English composer and Tanglewood favorite Thomas Adés to create a response to the Quintet, and his work “Wreath f.