Schubert's String Quintet in C and the UK premiere of Thomas Adès's Wreath, at Wigmore Hall on Wednesday 23 September 2026.
The Danish String Quartet met at a summer music camp as children, where they played football together as well as music, formed a serious quartet as teenagers at the Royal Academy in Copenhagen, and made their debut in 2002. They have kept an unusual double life since: the Beethoven and Schubert repertoire on one hand, and their own arrangements of Nordic folk tunes on the other, played with the same seriousness. Three of the four have been together for well over twenty years.
Schubert’s String Quintet in C is the piece they have come to play. He finished it weeks before he died in 1828 and it was not performed for another twenty-two years. It adds a second cello rather than a second viola, which drops the whole sound and is the reason the slow movement does what it does. The Adès is a commission the quartet raised itself rather than one a promoter handed them, which is why it gets the second half.
Johannes Rostamo takes the second cello at Wigmore Hall on Wednesday 23 September 2026. After the interval comes the UK premiere of Thomas Adès’s Wreath — for Franz Schubert, a single movement the quartet commissioned, and then ‘Die Nebensonnen’ from Winterreise arranged by the quartet’s own violinist. The Adès is placed after the Quintet, so it is heard as a reply rather than a preface.