New York Classical Review

When it’s not out there impressing audiences with its Haydn, Beethoven and Nielsen, the Danish String Quartet–violinists Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen and Frederik Øland, violist Asbjørn Nørgaard, and cellist Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin–explores the folkways of Nordic fiddle music in concert and recordings.

When it’s not busy celebrating the Scandinavian popular tradition of communal singing, the Danish National Girl’s Choir, currently led by the English conductor Charlotte Rowan, performs sophisticated contemporary music, often composed specifically for it.

So maybe the idea of a string quartet and a girl’s chorus performing together in Carnegie’s Zankel Hall Friday night was not so far-fetched after all. In fact, this particular collaboration goes back to 2018, and has resulted in significant new compositions, including David Lang’s in wildness, to texts by Henry David Thoreau and Hans Christian Andersen, which received its New York premiere Friday.

The Girls’ Choir, it should be noted, is not a children’s chorus but an ensemble of about 50 young women, ages 16 to 22, whose clear, youthful, mostly non vibrato voices combine and clash in intoxicating ways, not excluding the occasional screech and yawp in folk-oriented material. They are likely better known in Denmark than the quartet is, thanks to their annual televised New Year’s Eve performances.

Their versatility of tone color was the equal of the quartet’s, lending this evening of new music and folk songs many contrasts of sound as well as style. At one moment, barking strings might burst through a fog of vocal tone, while at others it was hard to tell voices and instruments apart.

The choir, in long blue dresses, moved slowly around the stage between numbers, sometimes to a quartet accompaniment (including, at one point, an andante excerpt from, Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” Quartet). They made various formations around the quartet, seated downstage center, crowding in for one piece, backing off to a double arc for the next. For several numbers, they arranged themselves like a diamond ring, with the quartet as the diamond.

A single prop, a large blue cloth, added visual interest, suggesting a river one moment and the sky the next. Spread wide on the stage during the American Lang’s tribute to exploring the wild, it made one think of the ocean the Vikings crossed to discover this continent.

Besides Lang, notable present-day composers included Caroline Shaw, whose Allemande from Partita for 8 Voices made clear right at the start that this was a choir to be reckoned with in terms of virtuosity and tonal range; Finland’s Lotta Wennäkoski, whose “Vorüber, ach, vorüber!” from Pige (Girl) made a skittering, colorful calling card for the quartet; and Iceland’s Anna Thorvaldsdottir, represented by her anthem Ƥann heilaga kross (On the holy cross) in an arrangement by Thomas Bryla that had the choir’s long lines sliding together in rich consonances and piquant dissonances.

As the program proceeded to the traditional dance tune “Kisti du kom” (Kisti you came), the ballad “Dronning Dagmar’s Død” (The Death of Queen Dagmar), “How Far” by the Danish electronic composer Astrid Sonne, and the robust singing voice of a Danish housewife recorded on a wax cylinder in 1907, a tribute to the role of women in Scandinavian life and culture was clearly taking shape. 

The ingenious, obsessively repetitious “And So” from Shaw’s Is a Roseand Nielsen’s “Tit er jeg glad og er brudestykke” (Oft I am glad, and a wedding tune) closed the first half on a vigorous traditional note.

“we wish to speak a word for nature/for absolute freedom and wildness” are the opening lines of Lang’s eight-movement cycle derived from Thoreau’s essay “Walking,” where the theme was heading West on foot to escape the suffocating rules and routines of Boston and environs.

Angry dissonance and sarcasm intruded here and there, but the prevailing mood was an encomium to the pleasures and spiritual uplift of walking free of all restraints. Abstract projections suggesting trees in leaf glowed on the stage’s back wall as the choir sang the ecstatic final movement, “we took a walk.”

Under Rowan’s crisp direction, Lang’s new piece emerged as a melodious yet challenging contribution to this year’s national birthday celebrations. And as a fresh idea for choirs and string players everywhere, it clearly has legs.

Carnegie Hall presents Kronos Quartet with violinist Laura Ortman, percussionist Quentin Baxter and pipa player Wu Man in works by Lorenzo Dow Turner, Charlton Singleton, Dai Wei and others exploring the histories of Indigenous, Gullah-Geechee, and Chinese American communities in the United States, 7:30 p.m. April 25 in Zankel Hall. carnegiehall.org