Danish String Quartet

LP version. On Last Leaf the Danish String Quartet return to Nordic folk music, the parallel path that made their 2014 album Wood Works on Dacapo a left-field hit. Sixteen short pieces, mostly traditional tunes from Denmark, Sweden, the Faroe Islands and Shetland, are linked into one continuous journey. Hymns, polskas, minuets and waltzes sit next to a few new tunes written within the group, all arranged by the four players.

The quartet are the violinists Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen and Frederik Øland, the violist Asbjørn Nørgaard and the cellist Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin, three Danes and a Norwegian. Their ECM debut in 2016 was devoted to Thomas Adès, Per Nørgård and Hans Abrahamsen, and this second album followed a year later. It was recorded in January 2017 at the Kirsten Kjær Museum in Frøstrup, in north-west Jutland. Sjölin also plays double bass, and Sørensen adds harmonium, piano and glockenspiel. The quartet produced the album, with Manfred Eicher as executive producer.

The journey ends with Now found is the fairest of roses, a Christmas hymn published in 1732 by the Danish poet H.A. Brorson. Brorson set it to a dark Lutheran funeral chorale, joining birth and death in one melody, and the quartet plays it slowly, as a quiet close. Æ Rømeser, from the village of Sønderho on the island of Fanø, is a dance with a melancholy edge. Sørensen's own Shine you no more takes its cue from John Dowland but runs more like a reel, and Sjölin contributes three pieces, among them Naja's Waltz. From Shetland comes the Unst Boat Song, an old song of Norse origin.

In Gramophone Andrew Mellor praised the ensemble precision and colour the players bring from their work on Shostakovich, and asked: "The best album of folk ditties from a string quartet you'll ever hear? Probably." Tim Woodall in Songlines (2018) found it quieter and more austere than Wood Works, and called it "a step forward in the Quartet's exploration of Nordic folk song and dance". Peter Margasak of the Chicago Reader put it among the most beautiful records of its year.

This is the LP edition of ECM New Series 2550, issued in June 2018. The album first appeared in September 2017.