NEW YORK – Fifty girls and young women, age 16-22, stood surrounding four seated men in their forties, with a (visibly pregnant) female conductor in charge. It was an unusual gender/power dynamic at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall on April 17, when the Danish National Girls’ Choir performed with the Danish String Quartet under the baton of Charlotte Rowan. The result was an exceptional and innovative choral program that included the New York premiere of David Lang’s in wildness.
The mournful violin of quartet founder Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen started in the wings, introducing the Allemande from Caroline Shaw’s Partita for 8 Voices. One singer followed him onstage, dragging a huge swath of blue fabric behind her like a river. The cloth remained during the concert’s first half, being moved, swayed, and walked across. One by one, the whole choir followed, arching around the string quartet with no risers. The other players came on, too: violinist Frederik Øland, violist Asbørn Nørgaard, and cellist Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin.
The chorus had mastered Shaw’s microtones, slides, and precise entrances and cut-offs. They clearly trusted Rowan. Later in the program, Shaw’s beautiful “And So” from her song cycle Is a Rose was just as memorable.
The choir sat on the floor while the quartet played the second movement of Lotta Wennäkoski’s Pige (Girl), written in 2022 to be paired with Schubert’s String Quartet in D minor (Death and the Maiden). It opened with violent dissonance, the musicians finishing each other’s thoughts in fragments that dissolved into breathless harmonics then returned to boisterousness. The Andante con moto theme from the Schubert grew out of the chaos as the girls stood, stretching their fabric river into a flat sea and standing around it. Without a break, tone clusters started Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Þann heilaga kross” (“On the holy cross”), shot through with glimmers of melody. The chorus sounded splendid in this neo-Renaissance a cappella church polyphony.
The Danish String Quartet picked up the last pitch of the Thorvaldsdottir as an introduction to the folk song “Kisti du kom” (“Kisti you came”). The words “you came and probably want to dance” kept returning in this buoyant yet darkly minor-key tune that blossomed into vocal and instrumental counterpoint. This was followed by the ancient, eerie folksong “Dronning Dagmars død” (“The Death of Queen Dagmar”), accompanied by what looked and sounded like an Irish bodhrán (goatskin drum).
There were two misses in the first half. The first was a (usually delicate) waltz by 18th-century blind Irish harper Turlough O’Carolan so overarranged for quartet that it practically turned into late Beethoven. The second was the song “How Far” by Astrid Sonne, which lacked either harmonic or melodic development. Reentering the sonic world of Caroline Shaw immediately afterward was a relief.
A highlight of the evening was Sørensen playing his traditional träskofiol (clog fiddle — literally a violin neck and soundboard attached to a wooden shoe!) in the New York premiere of his wonderfully melancholic “Once a Shoemaker.” Rather than singing lyrics over the muted, reedy träskofiol, the singers hummed and rubbed their palms together for a subtle percussive effect. Carl Nielsen’s setting of “Tit er jeg glad og et brudestykke” (“Oft I am glad, and a wedding tune”), a song about unrequited love and the confusion of feeling contrasting emotions, closed the first half in a display of the choir’s expressive range.
Lang’s in wildness had its 2025 world premiere in Stanford, Calif., by the Bang on a Can All-Stars. The text is Lang’s much-altered version of an 1851 essay called “Walking” by American philosopher Henry David Thoreau (of Walden fame). Lang also added lines from two poems by Hans Christian Andersen on the subject of walking in the woods.
All but one of the eight movements is sung. The instrumental “introduction to wildness” uses a lopsided meter and has an oddly mechanical rhythm for the topic of wilderness. Perhaps the repetitiveness at short intervals has more to do with the physical act of walking than with nature itself.
Much of the writing for voices might be called choral recitative: brief unison phrases with long pauses between them and without distinctive melodic arc. There is tongue-in-cheek humor in the text of this encomium to the art of walking — for example, when the writer warns that you must be prepared to say farewell to your loved ones and leave your affairs in order before going on a walk. Lang’s musical response to such moments is subtle (in that instance, a change to major).
The third movement, “no wealth can buy,” gives the quartet an unsettled texture like a stream rushing over rocks, beneath the choir’s long notes as they describe walking as a state of mind. The fourth and longest movement is an invitation to a peaceful walk; it’s drenched in chorale-like suspensions and resolutions. The chorus sings “The forest is inside us” as a drone pulses through the lower voices and strings. For the first time, there is an extended section of phrases interwoven into long stretches of sonic fabric without those frequent pauses.
In “nowadays,” the sequential suspensions turn strident (the stage was suddenly bathed in yellow light). The girls repeatedly sing “the landscape is not owned,” warning of deforestation and land-ownership’s threat to the future of walking. This gives way to “old tree,” a moving section built on a folk-like tune spun out into echoing layers. Its words about mortality are poignantly calm in a context of angular leaps. The final two movements, “the preservation of the world” and “we took a walk,” are both created from a minimalist technique using a limited pitch and harmonic palette.
Rowan kept the connection between strings and voices well controlled, understanding that, as is often true of Lang’s music, pushing and pulling at it does not make it more expressive. Often his power is in understatement, and methodical patience is the best way to tap that energy.
