Danish String Quartet

CD version. On Last Leaf the Danish String Quartet turns again to the folk music of the North, after its 2014 album Wood Works on Dacapo. The quartet arranged sixteen tunes, dances, boat songs and hymns from Denmark, Sweden, Norway and the Shetland Islands. A few new pieces by its members, written in the same idiom, sit among them. It was the group's second ECM release, following its recording of Adès, Nørgård and Abrahamsen.

The players are Frederik Øland and Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen (violins), Asbjørn Nørgaard (viola) and Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin (cello). Sørensen also adds harmonium, piano and glockenspiel, and Sjölin doubles on double bass. The album was recorded in January 2017 at the Kirsten Kjær Museum in Frøstrup, Denmark, and mixed that June at Tritonus Studio in Stuttgart. The quartet produced it, with Manfred Eicher as executive producer and Markus Heiland as engineer.

The quartet's starting point was “Now found is the fairest of roses”, a Christmas hymn published in 1732 by the Danish poet H.A. Brorson. Brorson set it to an old Lutheran funeral chorale, and the album returns to it in the closing track. The title points to Drømte mig en drøm, the oldest known secular song in the Nordic countries. It survives on the last leaf of the Codex Runicus, from around 1300, and here Sørensen's glockenspiel gives it a translucent edge. Æ Rømeser, from the village of Sønderho on the island of Fanø, is a dance with a melancholy undertow. Sørensen's own Shine you no more takes its cue from John Dowland but moves like a reel, and Sjölin contributes Shore, Intermezzo and Naja's Waltz.

In Gramophone, Andrew Mellor called it “a heartfelt, thoroughly researched and exquisitely performed journey through Nordic folk songs, dances and hymns from the past five centuries”. For Tom Huizenga at NPR in 2017, “the music erases borders between folk and classical”. Marcus Stäbler of Westdeutscher Rundfunk noted how many of the pieces lead straight into one another, so that the sequence grows into a single whole. In the New York Times, James R. Oestreich thought it should warm the heart of every fan of fiddling.

This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 2550, first released in September 2017.