Schubert’s late String Quintet met the UK premiere of a Thomas Adès work written for the players performing it, at Wigmore Hall.
The Danish String Quartet returned to Wigmore Hall in Marylebone on Wednesday 23 September 2026. They played Schubert’s String Quintet in C and the UK premiere of a Thomas Adès work they commissioned.
The four met at a summer music camp as children, formed a serious quartet as teenagers at the Royal Academy in Copenhagen, and made their debut in 2002. Three of the four have played together for well over two decades.
The group gives the Beethoven and Schubert repertoire and its own arrangements of Nordic folk tunes the same seriousness.
Schubert finished the Quintet weeks before he died in 1828, and it went unheard for 22 years. It adds a second cello in place of the more usual second viola, which lowers the whole register and gives the slow movement its weight.
After the interval came the UK premiere of Adès’s Wreath, for Franz Schubert, a single movement the quartet raised the commission for. Die Nebensonnen from Winterreise followed, in an arrangement by the quartet’s own violinist. Placed after the Quintet, the Adès was heard as a reply.
The cellist Johannes Rostamo joined the quartet as the second cello for the Quintet.