Wood Works, Danish Str Qrt, CD

The Danish String Quartet, at present the house quartet at both New York's Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society and BBC Radio 3, are taking the plunge as folk musicians with their new album on Denmark's national record label Dacapo, Wood Works. They're riding a wave of international success with classical quartet playing in the world's leading concert halls - from Lincoln Center to Wigmore Hall. The quartet's video of an old bridal piece from Danish Sønderho has spread like wildfire on YouTube with more than 50,000 viewings. They're the darlings of the press with classical reviewers, and in February were proclaimed "a hit ensemble" in The New York Times, at the same time filling a whole page under the heading "a hot Danish foursome" in The New Yorker. Here, these four elite classical string players drop the sheet music and play traditional folk from small Nordic villages in Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Norway and Sweden. No strangers to standard classical repertoire, the Quartet debuted on Dacapo with a prizewinning CD of string quartets by Carl Nielsen.