Tonight, the Artist Recital Series will continue with a visit from the renowned Danish String Quartet, who won the Carl Nielsen Prize, the highest cultural honor in Denmark, in 2011 and was named Musical America’s 2020 Ensemble of the Year. Most recently, they were awarded the 2025 Leonie Sonning Music Prize in the first instance of this award going to an ensemble instead of a solo artist. In addition to distinguishing themselves with their performance of the standard canon, they compose, arrange, and perform Nordic folk music, which will be featured in tonight’s concert.

“We are three Danes and one Norwegian cellist, making this a truly Scandinavian endeavor,” their bio humorously reads. “Being relatively bearded, we are often compared to the Vikings.”

While their cellist, Frederik Schøyen Sjölin, joined the group in 2008, the rest of the group has been friends since childhood, when they met at a summer camp.

In addition to performing at Finney Chapel tonight, each member of the group will be offering masterclasses to Oberlin students Saturday morning. Conservatory third-year Gabe Nichols will be performing in violinist Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen’s masterclass.

“They’ve been one of my favorite groups for a while, especially in Haydn and Beethoven,” Nichols said. “We only found out about [their residency] a few days ago, … but I hope to learn something new or think about the piece in a new way.”

Associate Dean for Artistic Programming and External Relations Sally Takada oversees and administers the Artist Recital Series, collaborating with faculty to determine who would be valuable to bring to campus. For Takada, it is important to invite musicians of many perspectives, including international, to the Conservatory as educational resources for students.

“The Danish String Quartet has been on my radar for a very long time, and I really admire their recordings,” Takada said. “They are recognized around the world as one of the leading actively touring and recording string quartets. … Many Obies are interested in experimenting with composing, arranging, improvising, and performing a wide variety of musical styles, including folk music, so I think that our students will enjoy interacting with a quartet who has been doing this at such a high level for many years.”

Nichols will be playing alongside double-degree third-year Annika Wapples in Sørensen’s masterclass. They have been playing together as part of the Cyrus Quartet since its formation during their first-year fall semester. The group has since toured Uruguay and premiered student work, and its members are now taking their second semester of Advanced Quartet seminar and make up one of the course’s longest-established groups. This semester, each quartet in the seminar is working on one of Beethoven’s string quartets, and they all came in with the knowledge that masterclass opportunities with celebrated classical quartets would be made available to them throughout the semester. Cyrus Quartet is working on String Quartet No. 11, commonly called “Serioso,” and has already played in an October masterclass with the Miró Quartet, who performed all of Beethoven’s string quartets over four days during Oberlin’s homecoming weekend. This weekend, they will play the fourth movement for the Danish String Quartet. As one of the shortest movements in a Beethoven quartet, the well-established ensemble has been able to dig deep into it.

“In contrast to a lot of the other groups in [Advanced Quartet seminar] who are all doing Beethoven, we have had a lot more time to do very detailed work because the themes and the structure of the piece is so compact that if you miss anything, it’ll go by and, no one will remember [the piece],” Wapples said. “If you mess up the second theme, it’s only four bars.”

All four members of the Danish String Quartet are offering simultaneous masterclasses Saturday 10–12 a.m. in Bibbins Hall, giving over 40 students opportunities to work with these celebrated musicians. The masterclasses are open to the public.