{TABLE} Quartet in B flat, Op 76, No 4 (Sunrise) ..... Haydn Quartet in F, op 44 .......................... Nielsen Quartet in G minor, op 27 .................... Crieg {/TABLE} THE Danish String Quartet's current ESB sponsored Music Network tour offers a most unusual programme. After a work by Haydn, the first great master of the quartet medium, there are pieces by Nielsen and Grieg, composers whose chamber music continues to languish in the shadow of their major successes.

Denmark's greatest composer, Carl Nielsen, was a string player himself (he spent 16 years in full time employment as a violinist), but, oddly enough, his best known chamber music has remained the Wind Quintet he composed towards the end of his career in 1922. The Op. 44 quartet, began life in 1906 as a piece titled Piacevolezza and was reworked into its final shape in 1919. It's a light and airy work, as its original title (the Italian for "charm") would suggest. The tonally refined Danish players seemed particularly well attuned to its agreeable idiom.

Although the bulk of Grieg's output was of piano pieces and songs, his public profile nowadays is as the composer of works with orchestra, the Piano Concerto and the Peer, Gynt suites. The G minor quartet, which dates from 1877, finds the composer uncharacteristically striving for an orchestral richness of sonority that was quite out of his reach with just four players. The familiar sugared tunes and Norwegian inflections are present, but the music jumps about distractingly rather than holding together with any sense of structure. In the Danish Quartet's colourful reading it was the dancing finale which made the strongest impression.

The opening quartet by Haydn, the fourth of the Op. 76 set, was played with an opulence of tone and amplitude of phrasing that made the work a fine showcase for some of the players' most impressive attributes. It wasn't really kind to the composer, though, to present his work in garb of such Brahmsian girth.