Danish String Prism iv

The Danish String Quartet's Grammy-nominated Prism project, linking Bach fugues, Beethoven quartets and works by later masters, receives its fourth installment. The penultimate volume of the series combines Bach's Fugue in G minor from the Well-Tempered Clavier (in the arrangement by Viennese composer Emanuel Aloys Frster) with Beethoven's String Quartet Op. 132 and Felix Mendelssohn's String Quartet No.2 (composed in 1827). As Paul Griffiths observes in the liner notes, these pieces "sound all the more remarkable for the exquisite brilliance and precision of the Danish players".

Danish String Quartet present the first of their Prism recordings, demonstrating the influence of J.S. Bach through Beethoven and beyond—his music developed, transformed, and scattered into colors as if through a prism. The Quartet begin their voyage with Mozart’s arrangement of a Bach fugue before diving headlong into Shostakovich’s 1974 String Quartet No. 15—a bleak, often dissonant meditation on mortality that draws on Bachian fugue and counterpoint. And in his remarkable 1825 Op. 127 String Quartet, performed here with a beautifully judged sense of narrative, Beethoven holds Bach in the palm of his hand as the music meanders and unfolds toward its radiant final bars.

The Danish String Quartet bring their highly acclaimed Prism project to its conclusion. In each volume of this series a particular Bach fugue is connected to a late Beethoven quartet which, in turn, is connected to a quartet by a later master: “A beam of music is split through Beethoven’s prism,” in the Danes’ words. “The whole approach invites active, committed listening,” The Guardian observed. “The group plays with virtuosity, intensity and tenderness.” The project has been eight years in the making. Now on the fifth and final volume, Johann Sebastian Bach’s chorale prelude Vor deinen Thron tret ich hiermit “opens up like a flower” (as Paul Griffiths writes in the liner notes) to preface Ludwig van Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 16 in F major. Anton Webern’s early String Quartet, composed in 1905 – and inspired both by Beethoven and Schoenberg – follows, and the programme returns to Bach with Contrapunctus 14 from The Art of the Fugue.

The third volume of the Danish String Quartet’s ongoing Prism series, which shows how the radiance of Bach’s fugues is refracted through Beethoven’s quartets to illuminate the work of later composers. “Beethoven had taken a fundamentally linear development from Bach,” the Danes note, “and exploded everything into myriads of different colours, directions and opportunities – much in the same way as a prism splits a beam of light.” Here the quartet follow the beam from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Fugue in c-sharp minor through Ludwig van Beethoven’s String Quartet no.14 to Béla Bartók’s String Quartet No.1.