Opus13 & Monbijou Quartet

Monbijou Interprets Blomberg and Haydn

Since its founding in 2022, the Monbijou Quartet has emerged as one of Scandinavia’s most promising young string quartets. The ensemble consists of Marcus Bäckerud, Alexander Hencz Chojecki, Oscar Edin, and Kristian Hencz Chojecki, all currently studying at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen.

The concert opens with Flyg! (Fly!) by Hanna Blomberg, written for the quartet and premiered as recently as this July. The work was inspired by the composer’s grandmother and by how, at the age of ninety-two, she let go of life despite her deep love for it and strong desire to remain. Musically, the piece draws on a traditional lullaby from Dalarna:

Fly over land and sea, fly west of the forests!
There the cranes trill, there the swallows soar.
There the midsummer weather is beautiful.

Blomberg’s piece is fittingly followed by Joseph Haydn’s String Quartet No. 5 in D major, Op. 76, sometimes known as the Friedhofsquartett (“Graveyard Quartet”). The nickname refers to the slow second movement, Largo, the work’s emotional core. Set in the unusual key of F-sharp major, it has often been described as a sorrowfully beautiful lament – a farewell in sound, painful yet dignified and consoling.

The quartet belongs to Haydn’s late and most inventive chamber music. From the very opening, expectations are subverted: instead of a clearly dramatic trajectory, we encounter a calm, songful theme that unfolds freely. After a playful minuet with unexpected rhythmic shifts, the work concludes with a virtuosic finale in which Haydn’s elegance, humour, and sense of form are fully on display.

Opus13 in Op. 13

After the interval, we meet Opus13, named after the first work that the four musicians performed together in Oslo in 2014, and also the quartet that concludes this concert: Felix Mendelssohn’s String Quartet No. 2 in F minor, Op. 13. Opus13 consists of violinist Sonoko Miriam Welde and cellist Edvard Erdal from Norway, violist Albin Uusijärvi – principal viola of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra – and violinist Daniel Thorell.

Opus13 opens with Britta Byström’s Images from the Floating World, a chamber suite in which the music unfolds as a sequence of fleeting sonic images. The title refers to ukiyo-e – “pictures of the floating world” – the Japanese woodblock print tradition depicting everyday life, pleasures, beauty, and landscapes, which flourished from the 17th century onward. Through a mosaic-like structure, transparent textures, and a colour-oriented musical language, Byström creates a sound world where each movement emerges as a self-contained image within a shifting sonic landscape. The work is inspired by the Icelandic Njáls saga, whose restrained, episodic narrative contains powerful depictions of conflict, violence, and death. Similarly, Byström’s music at first appears light and fragile, but beneath the surface lie dissonances and fissures in the sonic fabric.

To close the concert, Opus13 performs Mendelssohn’s String Quartet in F minor. Composed in 1827 when Mendelssohn was just eighteen, the work reveals remarkable artistic maturity. It is also one of the earliest and most fully realised examples of cyclic form in chamber music, in which a motif from his own song Frage – with the words “Ist es wahr?” (“Is it true?”) – serves as a unifying thread, reappearing in varied forms throughout all four movements.

The first movement begins with a quiet Adaio before a dramatic Allegro bursts forth; here, the song motif is transformed into a tightly driven musical narrative. The slow second movement has a lyrical, almost vocal character, yet beneath the surface lie chromaticism and contrapuntal intensification that create tension and depth. The third movement, an intermezzo, carries traces of Mendelssohn’s characteristic, fairy-like lightness, while the finale unifies the work by recalling earlier motifs and ultimately bringing the music back to its beginning.

Text: Bodil Hasselgren