Franz Schubert and Thomas Adès are two composers whose works are capable of touching the cosmos — in different centuries, and often in different ways.
The beauty of Schubert tends to be quiet and shatteringly calm, his postcards from the beyond written in lyrical melodies sometimes underlined with nothing more than a chord. Adès, particularly in the past decade, seems to have flung open the gates of heaven, unleashing forces that overwhelm and awe in their immensity.
Yet each has also done the opposite: Schubert, in his aptly nicknamed “Great” Symphony, with its Beethovenian heft, for example, and Adès in his hypnotic and weightless “Paradiso” section of “Dante.” At Zankel Hall on Thursday, the composers met somewhere in the middle as they were paired for the fourth and final installment in the Danish String Quartet’s Doppelgänger project.
One of the great pleasures of recent seasons, Doppelgänger has surveyed Schubert’s late quartets while commissioning new works that respond to them. Thursday brought perhaps the composer’s finest chamber work, the String Quintet in C; Asbjorn Norgaard, the Danes’ violist, joked from the stage, “We are the Danish String Quartet, with a Finnish cellist,” gesturing to their guest, Johannes Rostamo.
In previous Doppelgänger programs at Zankel, Lotta Wennakoski’s “Pige” homed in on the maiden of “Death and the Maiden,” and Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Rituals” played with the repetitive nature of the “Rosamunde” Quartet. (Because of pandemic delays, the project will actually return next season, with Part I.) Each evening has ended with an arrangement of a Schubert song; on Thursday it was “Die Nebensonnen,” from “Winterreise.”
Adès himself behaves like something of a Doppelgänger. A master of the uncanny, he has arranged existing works and written homages to the likes of Couperin and Liszt in a slippery blend of reverence and surrealism. Here, in “Wreath for Franz Schubert,” he takes a single phrase from the second movement of the Quintet and riffs on it nearly beyond recognition, as in “Darknesse Visible,” his piano treatment of the John Dowland song “In Darkness Let Me Dwell.”
“Wreath” looks, and sounds, much simpler than it is. The players pluck or bow a two-note, upward phrase that continuously changes in its harmony and volume; each measure is different, transforming like the broken chords of Bach’s famous Prelude in C and settling into a meditative flow.
Once that happens, it can be easy to lose your sense of time. And that is baked into the score: “Wreath” runs “15-25 minutes” because neither its rhythms nor note durations are to be played as they appear. Adès writes “sempre molto rubato” in the first measure, a direction to maintain a constantly fluid tempo.
This is where the piece gets incredibly difficult, but also magical. The players are both independent and interdependent; if the violins are a central reference point, then the viola and cellos can be roughly within one measure of them in either direction. Their individual freedom requires constant attention to the greater ensemble, in a tricky balance of forward motion and patience. Often soft, ending on an extreme and mostly symbolic “pianississississimo,” the music takes on a perfumed haze.
It is gorgeous, more the Adès of “Paradiso” than the grandly rollicking “Inferno.” And although it is inspired by the second movement of the Schubert, it is a fitting companion to the entire work, which even at its showiest is never far from profound beauty. The Quintet, as Norgaard said onstage, is “more than just a piece.” Like much of late Schubert, it seems to contain more than the heart can handle at once: mystery, grief, ferocity, joy, terror. Above all, grace.
All that was present on Thursday. The Danes — Norgaard on viola, Frederik Oland and Rune Tonsgaard Sorensen on violin, Fredrik Schoyen Sjoin on cello — are among the most skilled and intelligent interpreters of late Schubert and Beethoven, affecting but not overly emotional, organic and sometimes shockingly daring, but unified in their vision.
With Rostamo, the first movement’s opening chords had a reediness that gave way to lyricism with an underlying wildness that emerged, as the music developed, in swerving cello dissonances that felt as if they threatened to pummel the delicacy of the violins. The second movement unfurled as a lonely outpouring of ember intensity that, with a sudden blow, burst aflame. Specialists in folk music, the Danes brought a rustic bliss to the Scherzo and mercurial finale, in a juxtaposition of celebration and reflection, like the first party after the darkest days of the pandemic.
It can be difficult to talk about the Quintet without resorting to hyperbole. This is the kind of piece that you would take to a desert island, that you return to throughout your life and maybe even want to hear at the end. Not for nothing did Norgaard describe it as “legendary for a reason.” So it feels appropriate to say that Thursday’s excellent performance of it had the power to make you grateful for the very existence of music.
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