La Jolla Music Society is presenting the Danish String Quartet and Danish National Girls’ Choir on April 12
Lucky San Diegans have heard the Danish String Quartet perform live during or after the foursome’s 2019-21 residency with La Jolla Music Society. Those who have expect a high-quality musical experience with a twist or two.
Next Sunday, the Danish String Quartet is returning to the society’s Baker-Baum Concert Hall. This time the group will perform with its compatriots, the Danish National Girls’ Choir. Again, expect the unexpected.
“A girls’ choir with a string quartet is something that, on the surface, sounds quite easygoing, pleasing and quite pretty,” said Charlotte Rowan, conductor of the Danish National Girls’ Choir. “You have a glass of wine and a nice cheese board while you’re listening to it.”
“That’s far from our approach,” she said. “We’re hoping to shock and move people in the best way classical music can. We’re looking forward to hopefully surprising audiences and showing the power of these two ensembles.”
The Danish String Quartet and the Danish National Girls’ Choir will perform at the Baker-Baum Sunday next Sunday. Half of the concert will showcase music by women composers and the other a new work by 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winner David Lang, a cofounder of New York’s cutting-edge music organization Bang on A Can.
The quartet and girls’ choir have performed joint concerts occasionally since 2014, but this is their first tour together in the U.S. The choir’s 50 members are between the ages of 16 and 21. While the choir usually mixes old and contemporary chamber-music pieces and Nordic folk songs, this tour’s particular repertoire was chosen to complement Lang’s “In Wildness.”
Danish String Quartet violinist Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen, also an arranger and composer of songs that will be featured next Sunday, said the tour was five years in the making.
“We know more about what this musical constellation can do and all the fantastic opportunities that we have together,” Sørensen said. “It’s very special to have 50 singers singing, right? It’s just a magical experience.
“They are such an amazing group of people. Not only do they sing well, but it also looks beautiful the way they move on stage and change positions. They do most of the concert by heart and are really inspiring to work with.”
Both the quartet and the choir are considered national treasures in their home country, where community singing is an integral part of its culture. The popular Folk High School Songbook of Denmark (which ranks second among the world’s happiest countries) was first published in 1894 and is updated every few years — often to lively debate.
Conductor Rowan noted that this connection between music and community is vital to Danish culture.
Originally from Liverpool, England, Rowan moved to Aarhus, Denmark, where she earned her master’s in choral conducting and worked with a boys’ chorus there. She relocated to Copenhagen for her “dream job,” conductor of Danish Radio’s DR Pigekoret, known internationally as the Danish National Girls’ Choir.
“I completely fell in love with the music scene in Denmark,” said Rowan, who also fell in love with her Danish husband. “I love the community Denmark’s built around music. It’s a unique musical landscape. The quartet and the girls’ choir are perfect examples of that for me as a non-Dane. They say everything about the shared chamber music history of Denmark and the Nordic region.”
“I’m completely sold. I want to be as Danish as anyone can possibly be.”
Like Sørensen, Rowan arranged some pieces that will be performed on Sunday, including Lang’s “In Wildness.” Using texts from Henry David Thoreau and Denmark’s Hans Christian Andersen, Lang said he changed the voices from cranky old men to the choir’s future-oriented women.
La Jolla Music Society is part of a global consortium, including the girls’ choir, that commissioned “In Wildness.” The world premiere was in Copenhagen on March 14, and the audience was equally enthused by both halves.
“We’re hoping that American audiences will love it as much as our lovely Danish audience did that night,” Rowan said, adding that Lang’s been a friend of the choir since 2016.
“David is so kind. He thought of the choir so much in writing this work. You can hear it in the way he’s texturized the work and the voice divisions.”
In the first half of next Sunday’s concert, the featured female composers include Denmark’s Astrid Sonne, Finland’s Lotta Wennäkoski, Iceland’s Anna Thorvaldsdottir (who earned her PhD from UC San Diego), and American Caroline Shaw (who is a multiple Grammy Award-winner and Pulitzer Prize recipient).
“We have this theme of inspiring musical women from the Nordic regions and across the Atlantic,” Rowan said. “If we are asked for an encore – we’ve made a new arrangement of (Spanish pop star) Rosalia’s ‘Reliquia’ because we wanted to celebrate an amazing current musical voice. We’re hoping that will be a boost at the end of a wonderful evening for the people who are joining us.”
This is the first time in San Diego for Rowan and the choir, but because of the quartet’s three-year residency, they feel comfortable in La Jolla.
“It’s a wonderful little spot in the world,” Sørensen said. “It’s nice having the opportunity to go back to a place where, you know the good restaurants and the people working behind the stage. It means that we’re in good company, so that we can perform better.”
Danish String Quartet with the Danish National Girls’ Choir
When: 3 p.m. Next Sunday, April 12
Where: Baker-Baum Concert Hall, Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center, 7600 Fay Avenue, La Jolla
Tickets: $65-$98
Phone: 858-459-3728
Online: theconrad.org/events/danish-string-quartet/
Prelude lecture at 2 p.m. by Michael Gerdes, director of the San Diego State Symphony Orchestra. Free for ticketholders.