I first encountered the Danish String Quartet when UC San Diego’s ArtPower brought them to San Diego in 2014. Since that auspicious local debut, the La Jolla Music Society has brought these great Danes back to San Diego with rewarding regularity. Their programs have offered refined, bravura performance combined with adventurous programming that has included music by lesser known contemporary European composers such as Jörg Widmann and Hans Abramsen.
Sunday at The Conrad, the Danish String Quartet appeared with the Danish National Girls’ Choir making its San Diego debut, a rewarding programming coup for these string players. This choir of some 50 young women conducted by Charlotte Rowan proved as polished and as probing as the members of the Danish String Quartet, and their sophisticated program of contemporary works—some composed or arranged for this unusual musical combination—as well as traditional Danish folk music could not have been more winning.
On the program’s first half, the Danes served a generous helping of Scandinavian music: a fervent sacred motet by the contemporary Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir Pann heilaga kross (On the holy cross), Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen’s arrangement of a serious folk song about the 12th-century Danish Queen Dagmar Dronning Dagmar ligger udi Ribe syg (Queen Dagmar lies in Ribe, sorely ill), and Sørensen’s rousing arrangement of a playful Swedish folksong Kisti du com (Kisti you come). Though the choir sang the motet a cappella, revealing their compelling blend of carefully balanced and well-trained young voices, the string quartet was adroitly woven into the two folk songs. Carl Nielsen, Denmark’s most celebrated composer, was represented by a setting for voices and strings of his song Tit er jeg glad og et brudestykke (Oft I am glad, and yet I long to weep), an impassioned love lament with soaring vocal lines and a string accompaniment with orchestral aspirations.
The quartet played Pige (Girl), an acerbic short bagatelle by the contemporary Finnish composer Lotta Wennäkoski and offered a glowing account of the slow movement from Franz Schubert’s beloved Death and the Maiden String Quartet, D. 810.
A good portion of the program was devoted to music by the American composers Caroline Shaw and the Pulitzer Prize-winning David Lang. Shaw’s Allemande from Partita for 8 Voices opened the Danes’ program. Shaw wrote this astonishing work that brilliantly integrates spoken and sung text for her ensemble Roomfull of Teeth, and the Danish National Girls’ Choir gave a slightly more refined account of this piece than the YouTube version made by Shaw’s ensemble. Nevertheless, it was an arresting opening of the concert.
David Lang’s cantata in wildness, commissioned by the Danish National Girls’ Choir with assistance from several U.S. arts organizations including the La Jolla Music Society, was premiered by the choir a month ago in Denmark. In his program notes, Lang explains that his work was inspired by the famous Henry David Thoreau quote “In Wildness is the preservation of the World.” In addition to extensive use of texts from Thoreau’s 1851 essay in which that quote appeared, Lang added shorter texts by the noted Danish author Hans Christian Andersen. In eight movements, this 30-minute choral meditation celebrates nature’s spiritual depths and humanity’s complex relationship to the natural world.
In this work, Lang’s choral style favors complex, slowly-moving harmonic progressions in which long, sustained dissonances slowly resolve, an approach also found in the large choral works of Morten Lauridsen. When the text laments civilization’s encroachment on nature, however, Lang’s choral style employs an insistent declamation that is clearly sermonic.
After the string quartet’s understated prelude, a movement titled “introduction to wildness,” the instruments’ function in the cantata is discreetly supportive.
Throughout the concert, the choristers responded enthusiastically to Rowan’s clean, assertive direction, and she persuasively shaped the Lang cantata with its highly discursive rather than poetic text.
This concert was presented by the La Jolla Music Society on April 12, 2026, at La Jolla’s Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center.