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The Danish String Quartet will deliver a double dose of Beethoven in the Chamber Music Society of Salt Lake City's season-opening concert.
The acclaimed young ensemble will play one of the composer's early quartets — No. 4 in C Minor, from the Op. 18 set — and Quartet No 9 in C Major, one of the Op. 59 quartets commissioned by Russian diplomat Andreas Razumovsky.
Sandwiched between the two Beethoven quartets will be Leos Janácek's String Quartet No. 2, nicknamed "Intimate Letters." The work was born from the composer's unreciprocated love for a woman who was much younger — and married to someone else.
"To be honest, he must have been mad," said cellist Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin in a phone chat from a rehearsal room in a Copenhagen music conservatory. He noted that the musical ideas in the piece are fragmentary. Though there are poetic sections, "it's not meant to be nice."
He said it's been fun to revisit the Op. 18 Beethoven quartets, which he learned in his early teens. "It's like you have a new pair of glasses on, and you realize how many incredible things you missed."
Sjölin, who is Norwegian, is the group's lone non-Dane. The others began playing chamber music together as preteens. When their original cellist left, they looked up Sjölin, whom two of them had met while studying chamber music in Sweden. "We're fortunate to have met each other," he said.
When • Monday, Oct. 10, 7:30 p.m.
Where • Libby Gardner Concert Hall, 1375 E. Presidents Circle, Salt Lake City
Tickets • $30, $10 for students; season passes, $150 and $30 (seven concerts); various packages also available, including an option to donate 10 student tickets to the school of your choice for $100; cmsofslc.org
Catherine Reese Newton