Boston Classical Review

The Danish String Quartet performed Friday night at Jordan Hall, presented by Vivo Performing Arts. Photo: Robert Torres

“I do not ask for my music to be interpreted,” Maurice Ravel once offered. “Just that it be played.”

If only the French master could have been at Jordan Hall on Friday night when the Danish String Quartet wrapped their first concert in Boston since 2023 with an exquisite, diaphanous account of his Quartet in F major. This was no fusty, interventionist elucidation. Quite the contrary: it was a picture of totally natural, unaffected musicianship from four artists engaged in the work they were born to be doing.

So it went for the wider evening, which was presented by Vivo Performing Arts and also included selections by Alfred Schnittke and Jonny Greenwood. In all of it, the Danes brought their trademark intensity and purpose to bear, as well as a command of ensemble that was breathtaking for its practiced ease and astounding precision. The result was music making of uncommon immediacy.

The sheer invention of Ravel’s 1903 opus was lost on some of its earliest audiences: the composer’s teacher, Gabriel Fauré, went so far as to dub his protégé’s effort “a failure.” How such an eminent musician could have been blind to this quartet’s striking thematic unity, its brilliantly idiomatic string writing, and its deep reservoirs of expression is one of music history’s great puzzles.

Perhaps he needed the DSQ to light the way. They certainly delivered on Friday, playing with a tonal unanimity that beguiled the eyes and ears. For dynamics and sonority, theirs was a reading that was at once enchantingly atmospheric—the first movement’s accompanimental textures flickered like fireflies on a summer night—and downright somatic. The scherzo’s blistering rhythms tripped lustily while the finale’s asymmetrical phrasings snapped.

While those extroverted spots were rightly gripping, the quartet’s inward moments were just as absorbing. Violist Asbjørn Nørgaard’s solos in the Très lent were conspicuously warm and prayerful, while the central episode of the “Assez vif” unfolded with captivating focus.

Greenwood’s suite from his score to the 2007 film There Will Be Blood offered similar moments of introspection, even as those didn’t quite plumb Ravel’s emotional depths.

Even so, the searching lyricism of “Oil” and “HW/Hope of New Fields” had the benefit of not overstaying their welcomes. And, though much of the suite traffics in reflective tempos, the rocking figures undergirding the gently lilting refrains of “Prospector’s Quartet” delivered a welcome dose of momentum. Meanwhile, the mechanistic patterns and dancing pizzicatos of “Future Markets” offered a brief, bracing change of pace. (Though listed in the program, the “Detuned Orchestra” movement was omitted from Friday’s performance.)

Schnittke’s String Quartet No. 2, on the other hand, hails from an entirely different world, historically, stylistically, and expressively. Written in 1980 as a memorial to the composer’s friend, Larissa Schepitko, this 20-minute effort is unrelentingly grim, violent, and angry.

Dissonance and gritty textures abound. When three-quarters of the ensemble take up a seemingly hopeful gesture redolent of chiming church bells in the closing Moderato, the first violin’s E-flats bristle against the implied C-major triad underneath—and that’s one of the quartet’s more hopeful statements. Yet for all the music’s nihilism, a sense of humanity prevails, both through allusions to Russian Orthodox chant and hymnody as well as via the writing’s spirit of visceral anguish.

Though nobody would regard it as an easy listen, the DSQ’s account on Friday held the packed audience at Jordan Hall rapt. The vexing Agitato section, driving and explosive, was riveting as much for its physicality as for the group’s command of its musical content. Meantime, the Mesto’s lurching counterpoint and the finale’s ghostly fadeout were navigated with unsettling concentration.

In a sense, the night’s other items felt like efforts to exorcise the Schnittke’s demons. Any that weren’t purged by the time the Ravel rolled around at concert’s end were decisively expunged by the ensemble’s encore of the Faroe Islands folk tune “Goodnight & Farewell.” Here, music of unadorned simplicity and beauty spoke hauntingly across time and space.

Vivo Performing Arts presents the Chicago Symphony Orchestra playing music by Beethoven and Berlioz 5 p.m. Sunday at Symphony Hall. vivoperformingarts.org

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