Rackham Auditorium
Danish String Quartet: Doppelgänger
$12-20 student tickets available
Beginning as students at a summer music camp before they were even teenagers, the members of the Danish String Quartet have an extensive history of musical collaboration. For their third UMS appearance, they bring their Doppelgänger project, an ambitious four-year international commissioning project in which four composers create new works in response to a masterwork by Franz Schubert. In this program, they pair Schubert’s famous “Death and the Maiden” quartet with Pige (Danish for “girl”) — a new work by Finnish composer Lotta Wennäkoski, who has been praised for her mastery of color and musical textures.
PROGRAM (Fri 10/28/2022: Rackham Auditorium)
Franz Schubert String Quartet No. 14 in d minor, D. 810 (“Death and the Maiden”)
Lotta Wennäkoski Pige
Franz Schubert “Death and the Maiden” (Schubert song arranged by the Danish String Quartet)
Encore: “Will the Barber” (traditional folk ballad from the early 19th century)
Thank You to Our Sponsors
PERMANENTLY ENDOWED SUPPORT
- Carl Cohen, whose bequest will establish an endowment to support a Chamber Arts performance in perpetuity.
The Danish String Quartet celebrates its 20th Anniversary in 2022-23, and the GRAMMY®-nominated quartet continues to assert its preeminence among the world’s finest string quartets. Formed when they were in their teens, they are renowned for impeccable musicianship, sophisticated artistry, exquisite clarity of ensemble, and, above all, and an unmatched ability to play as one. Performances are characterized by a rare musical spontaneity, giving audiences the sense of hearing even treasured canon repertoire as if for the first time. They exude a palpable joy in music-making that has made them one of today’s most highly acclaimed and in-demand classical quartets, performing sold-out concert halls around the world. Their inventive and intriguing programming and repertoire choices have produced critically acclaimed original projects and commissions as well as popular arrangements of Scandinavian folk music.
Lotta Wennäkoski (born 1970 in Helsinki, Finland) studied first violin, music theory and Hungarian folk music in the Béla Bartók Conservatory in Budapest. She then studied music theory and composition at the Sibelius Academy and got her diploma in 2000. Her main composition teachers have been Eero Hämeenniemi, Kaija Saariaho and Paavo Heininen. 1998-99 Wennäkoski studied in the Netherlands with Louis Andriessen.