In 2018, Aksel Nielsen, cellist and a chairman of the Chamber music society "Brage inRanders", started a dialogue with composer Hanne Tofte Jespersen about a new string quartet. He wished to commission her to write a quartet for "Brage". They both liked the idea of the new work to be composed for a historical theme which would also be relevant for a present audience, incl. youth. They soon agreed on a context of a late Haydn quartet from the 1790s and Benjamin Britten's First String Quartet from 1941.
"Brage" invited Nordic String Quartet to take up the task and involved four other chamber music societies in the project. Neither Aksel nor Hanne had imagined how relevant it would prove to call the project "Times of Unrest". She completed her quartet in the spring of 2020, at the beginning of Covid-19 pandemic causing lockdown of any cultural events. The first performances in November 2020 took place just before the second coronavirus lockdown. By the time of recording and release of this album, there is once more a most unfortunate war on the European continent, not to mention the climate related "Times of Unrest" all over the good Planet Earth. The musical works of this project express both unrest, threat, hope and even vision of peace. © Danacord