For its third ECM release, the prize-winning Danish String Quartet hailed by the Washington Post as one of the best quartets before the public today and as simply terrific by The Guardian inaugurates a series of five albums with the overarching title of Prism, in which the group will present one of Beethovens late string quartets in the context of a related fugue by J.S. Bach as well as a linked masterwork from the modern quartet literature. With Prism 1, it s the first of Beethovens late quartets, his grandly life-affirming Op. 127 in E-flat Major, alongside Bach s luminous fugue in the same key (arranged by Mozart) and Dmitri Shostakovichs final string quartet, the No. 15 in E-flat minor, a haunted and haunting sequence of six adagios. A beam of music is split through Beethovens prism, explains DSQ violist Asbjørn Nørgaard in the ensembles prefatory note to the Prism series. Inevitably, we base our work on what we know, as individuals and as a group, but the important thing to us as musicians is that these connections be experienced widely on an intuitive level. We hope the listener will join us in the wonder of these beams of music that travel all the way from Bach through Beethoven as far as to our own times.
