Review: Thomas Adès Meets the Profound Beauty of Schubert

Franz Schubert and Thomas Adès are two composers whose works are capable of touching the cosmos — in different centuries, and often in different ways.

The beauty of Schubert tends to be quiet and shatteringly calm, his postcards from the beyond written in lyrical melodies sometimes underlined with nothing more than a chord. Adès, particularly in the past decade, seems to have flung open the gates of heaven, unleashing forces that overwhelm and awe in their immensity.

Yet each has also done the opposite: Schubert, in his aptly nicknamed “Great” Symphony, with its Beethovenian heft, for example, and Adès in his hypnotic and weightless “Paradiso” section of “Dante.” At Zankel Hall on Thursday, the composers met somewhere in the middle as they were paired for the fourth and final installment in the Danish String Quartet’s Doppelgänger project.

One of the great pleasures of recent seasons, Doppelgänger has surveyed Schubert’s late quartets while commissioning new works that respond to them. Thursday brought perhaps the composer’s finest chamber work, the String Quintet in C; Asbjorn Norgaard, the Danes’ violist, joked from the stage, “We are the Danish String Quartet, with a Finnish cellist,” gesturing to their guest, Johannes Rostamo.

In previous Doppelgänger programs at Zankel, Lotta Wennakoski’s “Pige” homed in on the maiden of “Death and the Maiden,” and Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Rituals” played with the repetitive nature of the “Rosamunde” Quartet. (Because of pandemic delays, the project will actually return next season, with Part I.) Each evening has ended with an arrangement of a Schubert song; on Thursday it was “Die Nebensonnen,” from “Winterreise.”