Dreaming about Mendelssohn

Kaya: Yeah. We started a school project, and our chat on Messenger was called “Novo Quartet 18/19. We thought it would be just like a one year thing. But eventually we just continued…

WFIMC: Do you remember your first rehearsal?

Kaya: we actually just recently looked at the chat messages. The first message was like “Hi guys. Saw on the schedule that we are playing together. What about this or that day?” And Daniel booked the room.

Daniel: Which I never do. Crazy to think about that…

WFIMC: So that was five years ago, in 2018, and you didn´t really know what you went into….

Nikolai Vasili Nedergard: We had no idea. In fact, I had never played chamber music in my life. It was one of my first rehearsals ever. We played Shostakovich, the Eighth String Quartet. I never looked at it, didn´t listen to a recording. It was just sight-reading…

WFIMC: Do you have a manager in the quartet, who does all the logistics?

Kaya: Yes. I´m the manager.

WFIMC: you are performing more and more concerts, and the quartet is really becoming part of your lifes. How has it changed during the last year? Is the number of concerts increasing a lot? And when did you make up your mind about the quartet?

Signe: Last year we decided to study together and go abroad. At that point, we decided that the quartet should be first priority.Before, we lived in Copenhagen. Last year, we lived in Vienna, then we moved to Oslo. Now we live in Paris, but next year we will move back to Vienna. We are part of a program where we move a lot. But we move together, and we´re always together. We play together, at the moment, 99% of the time. Quartet definitely takes precedence.

WFIMC: So only one year ago, you decided that you would do this series, that you would make the quartet your main job?

Daniel: I think after four years, it was not such a difficult decision whether we´d want a career as a quartet. For four years, we played quite a lot in orchestras, some solos here and there, but then the quartet slowly took over and became more addictive.

WFIMC: I'm just interested how you grew together and decided to do the quartet, because it's basically a decision for life. It´s like getting married. Usually, quartet members spend more time with the quartet than with their wives or husbands or partners. It´s a really big decision, but maybe competitions did play a role in it, too?

Kaya: There was not really a moment when we could put a time stamp saying: “Okay, let´s do it”. It came quite naturally. But I also think it's because, of course, there are some years between you two, and we weren't exactly at the same point in our education. Still, age-wise, we were all young and none of us had a desire to get a position in an orchestra. I think we were quite open to any adventures which might come.

Signe: But I think maybe some of us were more ready than others.

Nikolai: Yeah: I wasn´t ready at all. I was put in this chamber music thing, actually way too early. I was 18. I had just started the conservatory and I was put in this group. But at that point, I thought I would just practice a lot, play solo, go abroad, and practice even more.  So I was not ready at all.

WFIMC: Are you/ were you going to study more?

Nikolai: yeah. I wanted to practice as much as possible, because basically, you lose years as a solo player if you focus too much on chamber music. I had other worries as well- playing second violin is not that demanding technically…

WFIMC: do you switch parts at all?

Nikolai: No. We tried in the beginning, but we found our way and stopped.

WFIMC: Now that you are together, and you are not relying on orchestra playing, teaching, or solo performances, it must be quite hard to make a living with the quartet.

Daniel: That´s the point. But that’s the point why I think the quartet needs to be full on. If you want to do it, you really have to be amazing and convincing in order to make a living out of it. This X-factor is really needed and its very tricky if you are not fully focused.
Five years of quartet playing is just the beginning, so we really need to create a convincing identity as a group- good enough for audiences and convincing enough for concert venues to invite us and to be interested in our group.

WFIMC: Do you discuss this among the four of you, actually? Because I thought among all the quartets that I listened to in the last few days, your performance seemed really well rounded, both acoustically and visually. It was not just some music or some performance. You knew exactly what you were doing. You're wearing a certain dress that you want to wear because you have a certain image, you stand up because you make a difference and you project in a different way. There's many things that I found very convincing. For example, do you discuss how you go on stage?  How do you bow? There's so many small details. The more quartets you see in a row, the more critical you become about small details. Like- stupid example- they could have ironed this jacket a little bit better…

Daniel: True. My second shirt was very wrinkly.

WFIMC: No, I mean: how people in a quartet interact, how they move, how they look at each other. 

Kaya: we have a lot of pictures where we absolutely don´t bow together. This is not something we practiced. We talk about our image visually on stage and on social media, but we don´t make choreographies or anything.

Signe: We spend so much time together, I think we just grow together more and more in the same way. I think that also just maybe our bow is a little bit more coordinated now because we have tried it so many times. But I think we also want the audience to like both what they hear and what they see. It's true, we also like to think about what we wear on stage.

Nikolai: A smile and a friendly look makes a big difference. We are young, and we are happy people. We are happy to be on stage. We just walk up with a smile and a good mood and we bow naturally, actually quite freely, sometimes.

WFIMC: Just yesterday it was quite incredible. The hall lighting, the contrast of white dresses and black suits was very impressive.
Do you every have arguments? What do you do if you have problems with each other?

Kaya: Actually, no. We don´t have big arguments. We thought it would happen at some point, so we met a couple of times with a performance coach to learn how to talk to each other and how to respect each other. Maybe it helped without us actually noticing. We didn't meet any big controversies or problems or issues of any kind because we know how to deal with them.

WFIMC: The performance coach helped you with this?

Kaya: I don't know if „performance coach“ is the right word. He's a sports psychologist.

Nikolai: Just the way how you know to talk, you learn how to express things. You learn when and how to say no. That was an important point for me, actually. For the first three years I basically said yes to everything. Yes, let´s go practice earlier. Yes, play this one, play that one. Yes, let´s do yes. 

Daniel: Saying No is important. You have to do a lot of things for the group, but you also have to be happy with yourself. Like in every relationship, communication is key. You have to know when to tell certain things, or when to give a compliment- or when someone else needs a compliment. But it´s really nice because of this improved communication, you can see and feel that the group is developing in the right direction, and that gives us so much more comfort. I think that´s one of our biggest strengths. We're all good at communicating, we're all good with empathy and we can also sense our moods know how to take over a rehearsal. For example, if one person doesn't feel the best today, another person speaks a bit more and there's a secretive extra care for the one who doesn´t feel well.

Kaya: We also learned how to take better and longer or shorter breaks- how to break, actually.

Nikolai: Psychologically, it's better if you practice for 45 minutes, then take five minutes of break. Also, if you practice for one and a half hours and you spend one hour on just two bars of music, your brain is completely off. But then after one and a half hour, if we only have 10 minutes of break, that's way too little. We need to actually have a one-hour break…

WFIMC: in your competition interview, you said you enjoy long breaks.

Kaya: That´s also because we enjoy each other´s company. We enjoy time together.

WFIMC: I had this funny experience with the Guarneri Quartet back in 1993. They would come on stage completely separately. The first two together, than another one, then nothing for a long time, and finally the last one. They would have rehearsals where they play together for a while, then one person would stop and start arguing. The others would follow suit and argue, with raised voices, for the next 5 minutes or so. They would not listen to each other, really. At the end, someone would say: okay, let´s play, and they would go on. You felt that nothing had been achieved, and yet- there was some kind of secret consensus…

Signe: I think we actually don´t really fight at all. Except we fight backstage whenever we have to go back on stage when the audience gives applause. 

Nikolai: She and I, we are very different when it comes to walking on stage.

Signe: It´s like: go, go go on stage! No, wait a bit. GO! No, just a little longer… in the end, the audience decides.

Nikolai: It’s a fun thing to do. Like a tradition. 

WFIMC: okay, let´s ask differently. How do you deal with problems, let´s say if someone is completely out of tune? 

Daniel: I also think in a way, in a chamber group, at least that's how I approach it, I never think that one of us is out of tune. If something is out of tune, then the ensemble needs to be in tune. 

Signe: Actually, it was one of our teachers who pointed out that nobody is right or wrong here.

Daniel: There are slips, of course, but when we practice intonation, it's usually about a chord and how to build it together. I don't think we really play out of tune separately.

WFIMC: In an ideal world, yes.

Signe: But in a practice room, I think we definitely can guide each other.

Nikolai: We just listen. As a concept, someone listening always has a better ear. If I catch myself looking at my phone, not listening, then I have to trust them and what they are listening to.

WFIMC: Alright. Playing standing up! Do you also rehearse standing up?

Kaya: Mostly, yeah. If we are just working on intonation, then we can sit down because it doesn't change much. But for the outcome of musical aspects, I think it's better for us to stand up, because that's how it's eventually going to turn out.

WFIMC: Did you do this from the very beginning?

Kaya: No, only for about one and a half years. We got inspired at a competition one and a half years ago. We had never considered it, but at that time we agreed to try it.

Signe: At that competition, someone said we seemed a bit small on stage. Everything seemed blended together too much. It was almost too-good-to-be-true-quartet playing. But we didn´t quite feel very well as an ensemble, so we decided to actually try to get a little more energy and power by standing up.

WFIMC: It makes a big difference. What about i-Pads? Do you every use them?

Signe: Only for some contemporary music where you can´t turn the pages. 

WFIMC: I found it interesting to see how many quartets were using them on stage. And then there are some quartets where only two people use iPads, the others are using music.

Nikolai: We are all paper people. There is something charming about paper. These tablets…

Kaya: The stands look like robots!

Signe: I think we have also seen way too many performances with people having trouble turning pages. It just looks like it´s horrible.

Kaya: We had this experience too.

Signe: I tried it, turned a page and suddenly thought: “Oh no!”

Kaya: She had to turn off the iPad completely.

Signe: I turned the page and the screen was completely blank. There was no music on the page, only the notes I had “pencilled” in.

WFIMC: Let me ask a question about your repertoire. I found it very interesting that you chose this Mendelssohn in the final. It´s a very meaningful work, of course. But any thoughts about why you chose this one?

Kaya: One thing is that it was free repertoire, so we wanted to play something that we really love and that we feel comfortable with. Once in the finals, I think we just wanted to enjoy it. It turned out it was a really good decision to play the Mendelssohn. But we also have a story about this piece.

Daniel: Nothing bad (laughs) but 12, 14 years ago, I wasn´t sure if I was going to really play classical music. Mendelssohn a minor was the first recording I listened to on the loop, over and over. It was one of the first classical music pieces I fell in love with, next to Sibelius and Tchaikovsky. Then I remember having a dream about playing this piece sometime in the future. The viola part is just so beautiful.

Nikolai: I love it.

WFIMC: It's so apt to have this piece, because it's related to Beethoven and it was written when Mendelssohn was just 18. For a young quartet, I think it's a wonderful thing to present this work in the final. The final is most important, and usually, you would expect a late Beethoven, Brahms or something heavy. So this was just very special, I thought.
Did you play this piece also at the Nielsen competition, half year ago?

Signe: Yes.

WFIMC: Any memories from that competition that would be worth mentioning?

Signe: Lots of them. We are three Danes, and Daniel has been living in Denmark for seven years. I think we all feel very connected to Denmark. The Nielsen Quartet was one of the first pieces we played together. And after playing together for one year, we had already participated at the Nielsen competition once, and made it to the Semifinals. Since then, it has always been a goal to take part in the competition again and do well. So we were really happy about playing there again and winning a prize.

Nikolai: Playing on your home turf, staying at your own place, sleeping in your own bed- it makes a big difference.

WFIMC: Danish is everyone´s first language?

Daniel: No. I am from Poland.

WFIMC: But you speak Danish?

Kaya: Yes, he does.

Daniel: I cannot have a proper conversation yet, but I´m getting there.

WFIMC: Kaya, how is your Japanese?

Kaya: Fluent. It was my first language. But I was born in Denmark.

WFIMC: Great. Maybe just a few thoughts about the future. The future of the string quartet as a genre… sometimes it seems so hard to convey the qualities, the magic of this music to young people. It is so hard to get them interested. So if you play in a string quartet, I would be very concerned in what the future will bring in terms of public interest and new audiences. How do you create new audiences? I think your artistic project during the Geneva Competition was also related to this subject.

Kaya: Yes, actually it was. Our project was to make a concert series in Copenhagen, consisting of four concerts over two days, where we invite young chamber music ensembles that we met on our paths as a string quartet, that we met at master classes or competitions, that we became very good friends with, but that we don't know when we're going to meet again. Part of one of these concerts actually had the concept of playing minimalistic music, and cross classical music and light art. This was a way for us to try to bring in a new audience.
We played some concerts for young audiences before who had told us that they didn't know where to look during the concert. Something that's actually quite understandable. So we tried to build on that idea and do something about it. That was our first step to try to catch a new audience.

Nicolai: Also with your previous question, I think now we see a huge increase in chamber music groups in general. Especially in Denmark during the last three, four years, chamber music has just been growing immensely. Everyone wants to play piano trio or quartet.

WFIMC: That´s a huge increase in players, but not necessarily an increase in audience.

Nikolai: No, that´s true. But we thought maybe the fact that there are all these groups also makes a difference, and shows an increase in public interest.

WFIMC: Do you perform for children?

Kaya: In schools? Yes, we have done that a couple of times.

Nikolai: That´s a lot of fun. We did a concert for I don´t know how many kids at a Steiner school- more than 500, and it was insane. Every age from 5 to 15. We were standing in the middle, surrounded by kids. Then the different reactions from the different ages- it was very interesting.

WFIMC: What piece would you perform for kids, and why?

Nikolai: I think we played the Shostakovich Eighth Quartet. It´s quite rough, and the children understand there´s something violent going on. And then we won´t tell them about death and destruction, because they´re too young for that, but we talk about different emotions- anger and joy, depression and happiness. It´s easy to show the contrast between the pieces, and they are short pieces so no one gets bored very easily. ■

©WFIMC2023/FR

Fotos: ©A.L. Lechat, Concours de Genève/ ©WFIMC