Although classical virtuosos are generally well behaved, they’re not necessarily the most modest of souls. Still, it would take an unthinkable amount of chutzpah to call one’s group the German String Quartet, the Russian String Quartet, or even the Canadian String Quartet. In Denmark, however, violinists Frederik Øland and Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen, violist Asbjørn Nørgaard, and their cello-playing Norwegian ringer, Fredrik Sjölin, have caused not a ripple by expropriating their nation’s name for their band.

“Denmark is a quite small country, and not a place with a very strong classical-music tradition,” Nørgaard points out with an audible smile, reached at his Copenhagen home. “But I think the name was almost completely random. We had a couple of different names in our first couple of years; we tried different things and they didn’t really work out for us. And then at one concert we called ourselves the Young Danish String Quartet, and by coincidence there was a critic there who gave us a nice review. So we just stuck with that name—and then at some point we chose to skip the ‘Young’, because it seemed a little bit redundant. But we didn’t have a meeting and decide, ‘We will form the Danish string quartet of the next generation.’ It just sort of happened.”

Dropping the modifier was a good idea: the Danish String Quartet formed when its members were beardless teens, but the four musicians now sport enough facial hair to staff a Main Street coffee shop. And what’s more important than their being the best string quartet in Denmark is that, as they enter their 30s, they remain best friends.

“I don’t think we would be playing in this quartet if we were not friends,” Nørgaard says. “For many years, when we were younger and we took master classes here and there, many people would tell us that we shouldn’t socialize. We had a master class with the Takács Quartet, and they said, ‘Don’t socialize. You need to be professional.’ But we couldn’t stop socializing! Some years were like, ‘Should we maybe not see so much of each other when we don’t play?’ But we just couldn’t help ourselves. In the end, we just accepted that it was part of the way we did things.”

There are benefits to this intimacy, he continues. “Musically, it means that we have relatively few tensions. We give each other a lot of space, and we can also make hard decisions, because when you’re very good friends you don’t have to be polite to one another. Good friends can talk to one another in a very honest way. And also, because we really know each other so well, we don’t have to play in a safe way because that’s the only way it works. We can play in a risky way, and maybe gain bigger things sometimes.”

If all goes according to plan, evidence of this should be in ample supply when the Danish String Quartet plays Vancouver this weekend. On the program are two taxing masterpieces of the quartet canon, Dmitri Shostakovich’s Quartet No. 9 in E-flat Major and Ludwig van Beethoven’s String Quartet in C-sharp Minor, in addition to Felix Mendelssohn’s relatively carefree Capriccio and Fugue. Nørgaard explains that these works have been chosen because they illustrate how the fugue—a compositional form that involves multiple melodic lines played in polyphonic counterpoint—runs through the classical repertoire from Johann Sebastian Bach’s time to the present day.

“People consider the fugue to be a kind of formulaic writing, but Shostakovich uses it to completely blow your mind and explode the quartet on the stage,” says Nørgaard. “And the Beethoven quartet, the 131, opens up with a slow fugue that is some of the most profound music that has ever been written in western civilization.

“It’s interesting that this conception of the fugue can bring out so many different things in the string quartet,” he adds. “So many emotions! I think that’s the real idea of this program.”

One thing the Danish String Quartet’s weighty selection won’t bring out is its lighter side, as expressed in the recently released Wood Works CD, a thoroughly delightful selection of Scandinavian folk tunes arranged by the band itself. The project began when the group wanted to devise some distinctively Danish numbers to play as encores, but Nørgaard says that the emotional heft of the Beethoven, which will be the final piece on their program, precludes anything so exuberant.

“We have sometimes felt that after one of the late Beethoven quartets, it can feel kind of weird to go into a little jig,” he explains. “So what we’ll sometimes do is that we might play a slow-chorale kind of thing. Sometimes, though, we’ll play half classical, half folk—but you have to be very sensitive to what classical music you put with the folk music.”

It’s unlikely that anyone will be unhappy with what the members of the Danish String Quartet have chosen for their local debut—and holding back on the fiddle tunes might just encourage local listeners to bring them here again for some friendly fun.

The Danish String Quartet plays a Vancouver Recital Society concert at the Vancouver Playhouse on Sunday (October 19).