Belcea Quartet - Schoenberg and Beethoven, 11 June 2025

Wigmore Hall

Schoenberg: String Quartet no.1 in D minor, op.7
Beethoven: String Quartet no.14 in C-sharp minor, op.131

Corina Belcea, Suyeon Kang (violins)

Krysztof Chorzelski (viola)

Antoine Lederlin (cello)

Schoenberg must be one of the very few composers who, heard with late Beethoven, can emerge as the more difficult of the two. Whether intrinsically so is probably a silly and certainly a fruitless question; yet, in terms of overall programming, it made for an interesting and satisfying pairing from the Belcea Quartet, Schoenberg’s First (numbered) String Quartet followed by Beethoven’s C-sharp minor Quartet. 

Schoenberg’s work opened as if a sequel to Verklärte Nacht, not only in D minor tonality, but in motivic writing, melody, harmony, and much else. Quickly, its coil twisted in a supremely flexible performance which, as a whole, served more to question than comfortably conform ideas of its form ‘being’ the Lisztian four-movements-in-one. ‘Yes, but…’ was the fitting place to start—and continue. Schoenberg’s hyper-expressivity came to the fore not only in febrile instrumental lines but in their connection, division, and (re-)integration, the first Chamber Symphony rightly but a stone’s throw away, ripples soon reaching its world. Harmony and counterpoint created one another, putting me in mind of Schoenberg’s later recognition that Mozart had been his guiding star all along, long before he realised it (as in, say, the Fourth Quartet). Concerto-like violin solo, Brahms in ‘Hungarian’ mode taken surprisingly far east; post-Meistersinger fugato; Brucknerian unison; mysterious harmonics; themes poised between Brahms and Strauss, twisting as if the branches of a Jugendstil forest: these and more combined in a work of Beethovenian struggle poised between the composer’s own Pelleas und Melisande and Die Jakobsleiter. The Belcea’s – and Schoenberg’s – lingering goodbye, in essence an extended cadence, not only fulfilled and extended expectations; it also proved the ideal introduction to the concert’s second half. 

Beethoven’s Quartet emerged less as continuation than response, all the more touching – even Mozartian, albeit too ‘late’ in more than the chronological sense – for it. The fugue was shaped and built meaningfully without ever sounding moulded. The second movement in turn emerged tentatively from its shadows, soon establishing its own modus vivendi, fragility part yet only part of its character. Symmetries and onward development were the dialectic at play here, presaging those in fourth movement variations both rare and earthy. There was something exhilarating, arguably necessary, to the fresh air here: a woodland walk in the composer’s footsteps. The Belcea traced a path that took us somewhere stranger, disconcerting, even frightening, returning us safe and sound with a good dose of Beethovenian humanity. The scherzo’s relief had me smile and inwardly chuckle, its irrepressible qualities vividly told. A poignant, similarly noble sixth movement was disrupted by a seventh whose opening struck the fear of God into the hall, interiority of response no less disquieting. And so, that further dialectic was set up for the movement, without any sacrifice to the crucial element of surprise, to the eternal freshness of the work, and to the temporal freshness of this wonderful performance. It thrilled as it edified. 

As an unexpected bonus, we heard the slow movement from Beethoven’s final quartet, op.135. Its initial conception as an eighth movement, in D-flat major, to op.131 offered, if not an aural glimpse of what might have been, then a fitting choice of encore, tonally and otherwise. Its unfolding continued to surprise yet ultimately consoled.

Belcea Quartet - Beethoven and Haydn, 14 March 2013

Wigmore Hall

Beethoven – String Quartet no.14 in C-sharp minor, op.131

Haydn – The Seven Last Words of our Redeemer on the Cross, op.51  

Corina Belcea, Axel Schacher (violins)

Krzysztof Chorzelski (viola)
Antoine Lederlin (cello)

Thomas Quasthoff (narrator)

 

Seven movements and seven last words: I wonder whether that was the initial stimulus behind this programme. It does not necessarily reveal very much in itself – the extent to which Beethoven’s op.131 is in seven true movements is at least debatable – but, more importantly, prefacing the serenity of Haydn’s most extraordinary work for string quartet with that of late Beethoven had one both thinking and feeling, in a sense the essence of religion, in this case of Lenten religion.

 

The passionate fragility of fugal entries at the opening of Beethoven’s Adagio ma non troppo e molto espressivo sounded almost timeless, as if evoking not only Bach but even Palestrina, kinship with the Missa solemnis apparent without unnecessary underlining. Alleged purity of counterpoint may be a chimera, an ideological construct even, yet it seemed for a moment at least instantiated in the Belcea Quartet’s performance. Dynamic contrasts were ideally shaped by the harmonic ebb and flow, and vice versa. For all the austerity, humane Romanticism shone through: no hair-shirt non vibrato here. If the transition to the second movement were slightly blurred, momentum was soon regained, its D major tonality – up a semitone – sounding bright yet celestial. The third movement, itself essentially transitional though at the same time far more than a ‘mere’ transition, was handled with great care for its structural status and therefore broader meaning, preparing the way for a slow movement that was beautiful and rarefied, even if at times one might have wished for greater earthiness. Its third variation, however, offered a properly titanic mental struggle, almost a microcosm of the quartet as a whole. The scherzo rightly sounded as if the music were close to breaking point; indeed, it might readily have been taken further still along that road. Still, kinetic energy and splintering both physical and metaphysical were readily apparent. Austerity and humanity, however foreshortened, marked the transitional Adagio, quasi un poco andante, after which the vehemence of the finale, almost at times as angry as if this were Beethoven in early C minor rather than C-sharp minor mode, reinstated sonata form more defiantly than triumphantly. Moments of sweetness, of great tenderness, found their place in an intensely dramatic account.

 

Haydn’s Seven Last Words were presented interspersed with readings by Thomas Quasthoff. Whether they were Quasthoff’s own choice, I do not know, but they were arrestingly selected from Hölderlin, Novalis, Fouqué, Heine, Tieck, Rückert, and Eichendorff, and arrestingly delivered, the anger in Hölderlin’s Die Ehrsucht, for instance, followed by a consoling voice in Novalis’s Es gibt so bange Zeiten (the first Haydn sonata coming in between). There is of course no work remotely like this in Haydn’s œuvre or indeed anyone else’s, the singularity being not just a matter of a sequence of slow movements, not just of liturgical context, but also of Haydn’s musical response, his symphonic inspiration – the ‘original’ version was, after all, written for orchestra – yet filtered through tendencies, at least, of Baroque Affekt. Whilst written beautifully for string quartet in this arrangement, the music does not often sound like a typical Haydn quartet; nor should it. The Belcea Quartet’s responses seemed very well to understand the unusual qualities of this work. In tandem with Quasthoff, our concentration was held throughout, without the slightest fear that almost unrelieved ‘slow music’ might have one’s attention wander.

 

Echoes – or should that more properly be foreshadowings? – of Mozart were heard in the Introduzione. The players’ unanimity was impressive, and almost liturgically significant, in those extraordinary opening bars, Maestoso e adagio indeed. The ‘purely’ musical beauty of Haydn’s instrumental development told its own story and yet, at the same time, those of the Cross and of Hölderlin’s preceding Geh unter, schöne Sonne. The first sonata, placed as previously stated between Hölderlin and Novalis, offered a beauty that again approached that of Mozart, albeit with a variety of the plain-spoken unmistakeably Haydn’s own. Echoes of Haydn’s Stabat Mater informed, knowingly or otherwise, its successor: Amen dico tibi: hodie mecum eris in paradiso, a truly paradisiacal prospect before us, its developmental ecstasy quite overwhelming in my case. The tenderness of the Grave sonata (‘Woman, behold thy son!’) and the placing of Christ’s despair (Eli, Eli, lama asabthani) between Heine’s shipwrecked man (Der Schiffbrüchige) and an excerpt from Tieck’s novel, William Lovell, proved almost as moving, prior to the simple sublimity of the fifth sonata, Sitio (‘I thirst’). Corina Belcea’s first violin, moving quietly above pizzicato strings, met with vehement, indeed passionate response: agonising and yet not without consolation. Haydn’s response to the terrible words Consummatum est! proved searing, yet classically so, and all the more movingly so for that, likewise the surety of faith, without a trace of bitterness, in Christ’s subsequent commending himself into the hands of his Father. The plight of a world left behind – at least until Easter – made for a desolate earthquake.

Belcea Quartet - Beethoven, 14 May 2012

Wigmore Hall

String Quartet no.4 in C minor, op.18 no.4
String Quartet no.16 in F major, op.135
String Quartet no.7 in F major, op.59 no.1, ‘Razumovsky’

Corina Belcea, Axel Schacher (violins)
Krzysztof Chorzelski (viola)
Antoine Lederlin (cello)

In the light of the high standards of previous instalments of the Belcea Quartet’s Beethoven cycle (enabled by a bequest from long-standing Wigmore Hall audience member, Mrs Kate Goetz), this concert somewhat disappointed. There were good things in it, but it was perhaps only the performance of the early op.18 no.4 quartet that really convinced as a whole. Its first movement benefited from a splendid contrast between the first subject’s febrile – I was almost tempted to say ‘highly strung’ – tension and the second group’s cultivated, Haydnesque give and take. Tension was maintained throughout, Beethoven really taken by the scruff of his neck. And the surprise, echt-Beethovenian, of the coda fully registered. The second movement was nicely turned, perhaps surprisingly delicate, but winningly so, even though I did not quite feel that the players succeeded in preventing it from outstaying its welcome. At any rate, the renewal of tension in the tightly-knit minuet, both in terms of work and performance, was palpable. The principal theme of the finale was frenetic, but not inappropriately so, rather akin to Mendelssohn with added grit. A beautiful, almost Mozartian contrast in terms of major-mode material provided relief, albeit briefly so.

Beethoven’s final quartet, op.135, opened as it should, as if the argument had been going on for some time. One certainly felt that this was an entirely different world from that of op.18 no.4 The dialectic was well managed, indeed dramatically handled; fragmentation was often threatened yet line was maintained, with difficulty (as it should be). Harmonic strangeness still registered, as did radical concision of form. Much the same could be said of the second movement. Though I felt the opening was slightly under-played, a whirling vortex of potential disintegration was soon apparent, dance threatening to extend out of control, rather along the lines of Don Giovanni. The slow movement, however, disappointed. Its opening, and not just the opening, proved fuzzy. Much of the movement’s course seemed observed rather than immanent, sublimity missing or at least intermittent. This is hardly grand, public music, but nevertheless communication of its soul seemed lacking. It also seemed a little rushed. Strangeness and tension again registered in the finale. And yet, despite a battle between the angry and the playful, I missed a sense of the metaphysical such as would be conveyed in outstanding performances of this work, or indeed of late Beethoven in general.

The first ‘Razumovsky’ quartet again opened intriguingly, in medias res. Its first movement was on the swift side, though not unreasonably so. It might, however, have relaxed a little for the second subject. Antoine Lederlin’s cello playing was an especial pleasure: suave and well-rounded. Dramatic projection of the development’s counterpoint was especially noteworthy from all concerned. The second movement progressed fluently, yet only intermittently did the performance dig beneath the surface. When let off the leash, the players permitted themselves some splendidly abandoned playing; one longed for more of that. The opening couple of bars of the slow movement harked back to their counterparts in op.135, suggesting haziness to be an interpretative strategy rather than a mishap. At any rate, I remained unconvinced, though the music soon came into focus. Nevertheless, this really lacked the feeling of breadth a Beethoven slow movement demands, whether it be part of a quartet, a piano sonata, or a symphony. It simply felt hasty, which is not solely, or even primarily, a matter of tempo. There was also something of a wiry edge to string tone at times. The finale was frenetic. Though not inflexible, it might have breathed more easily. It benefited, however, from a good sense of harmonic exploration.

Belcea Quartet - Beethoven, 21 January 2012

Wigmore Hall

String Quartet no.2 in G major, op.18 no.2
String Quartet no.8 in E minor, op.59 no.2, ‘Razumovsky’
String Quartet no.14 in C-sharp minor, op.131

Corina Belcea-Fisher, Axel Schacher (violins)
Krzysztof Chorzelski (viola)
Antoine Lederlin (cello)

I have almost nothing but praise for this concert, but perhaps no praise would be higher than to say that these performances from the Belcea Quartet had me wondering anew at Beethoven’s achievement as a composer of string quartets. Of course, no one who was not certifiably insane would doubt that achievement; yet, in a sense that is the point, for to elicit such wonder, rather than mere confirmation, testifies to the quality of the performances heard.

The op.18 quartets can seem – and certainly have seemed, in my experience – relatively uninteresting in lesser hands, but there was no opportunity to entertain such an impression on the present occasion. There was a splendidly Haydnesque opening: nothing wrong with that, indeed everything right with it, though it was soon answered by someone who was indisputably Beethoven, the Beethoven of relatively early piano sonatas, such as his op.13 and op.14 works, which I long found more interesting than the first set of quartets. No longer. The first movement exuded intensity, not to be confused with excessive Romanticism in the manner of, say, the Borodin Quartet, yet benefited equally from a fine command of line: the Belcea players knew where the music was heading, and enabled it to arrive. There were times when I wondered whether the reading was a little scaled down – I have certainly heard greater drama – but the intimacy drew one in, just as these players had in Schubert in the absurdly cavernous space of the Royal Albert Hall last summer. The muted - not in a technical sense – passages of the development were a case in point, until the triumphant cello pedal reminded us of another Beethoven, the incipient symphonist. Even then, the performance quickly subsided, insisting that we as listeners did our fair share of the work. There was a lovely throwaway ending too, throwaway not equating to inconsequential. The Adagio cantabile was rapt, lyrical, benefiting greatly from Corina Belcea’s sweet-toned first violin. Though the line faltered slightly before the astonishing scherzo intervention, apparently straight out of a much later Beethoven, there was little else about which to cavil. The third movement was graceful: a scherzo, but a scherzo with definite roots in the minuet, not unlike that to the op.2 no.2 piano sonata. In both works, and in good performances of both works, the anacrusis will – and here did – perform a crucial structural role. The trio, meanwhile, offered delightful hints of the serenade. Beethoven’s finale proved more vigorous, underlining the exploratory radicalism of his key relationships – as well, more briefly, as his hints at Elysium. And yet, this remained emphatically a conversation between instrumentalists such as Haydn would have understood. Moreover, the reinstatement of the tonic came, quite properly, as a Haydn-like surprise, timing and humour finely judged.

Greater terseness and an almost Sturm und Drang Romanticism immediately announced the world of the Razumovsky quartets, in this case the second. Silences too were given their due, especially in the first movement. Moreover, the players were not afraid to employ a less than beautiful sound where necessary, or at least justifiable. The slow movement was exquisitely presented: what in lesser hands can border upon the banal, for instance the scale passages, here sounded every inch as ecstatic – and musically necessary – as the more obviously ‘sublime’ passages. Climaxes were insistent without the all-too-common short-circuit of driving too hard. Above all, here was to be heard Beethoven’s noble simplicity, its roots in Gluck and Winckelmann’s Classical ideal. If the febrile, concentrated scherzo always makes me think of Boris Godunov, that is my problem of hindsight: Beethoven’s counterpoint has its own Classical, and at times modernist, tale to tell, and very well was it told here. The finale evinced an excellent balance between intensity and insouciance, which is to say that it was not quite a balance, but nevertheless gave the latter its due.

How does one speak about the late quartets? They travel so far beyond language, even beyond music as conventionally understood, that one hardly dare try. Fortunately my brief on this occasion is merely to write about a performance, though again the holy ground of op.131 renders one at the very least wary. At any rate, the first movement plunged us immediately into another world again: this time, somewhere between, or perhaps rather beyond, Schoenberg and Bartók. The Belcea’s sound was rarefied, or perhaps better rare, more than once putting me in mind of Mozart in a related key, the F-sharp minor of his twenty-third piano concerto. Passion was not excluded, far from it, but rather was sublated – I can hardly avoid the Hegelian ‘aufgehoben’ with respect to late Beethoven – into something that both negated and incorporated its relatively narrow standpoint. Bach and Palestrina were ghosts at the feast, as again was that Gluckian noble simplicity: I could not help but think that the three conventional ‘periods’ of Beethoven’s career were made for Hegelian, dialectical treatment. This movement, in any case, stood as a portal to integration and disintegration such as Adorno would have understood. As Boulez has remarked, Beethoven’s late quartets will always remain an intellectual challenge; and if they will for him, they surely will for us.

Negation, then, came with the second movement, and what a negation: somewhere between Mozart and Haydn, yet again somehow beyond them. Yes, this was of course Beethoven’s doing, but the performers play a role too. No sooner was this said, then further negation must be done, in the transition to the fourth movement: not just dialectics, but a definite instantiation of the post-Burkean sublime, akin to that of the late piano sonatas. Karl Barth famously remarked that, if the angels played Bach in front of God, they must perform Mozart en famille; the fourth movement presents a case for inclusion of Beethoven in their familial repertoire. For this is – and, in performance, was – Mozartian in Magic Flute fashion, or Haydn-like in the sense of his late, wondrous F minor/major piano variations. Just the right note of restrained yet ecstatic sublimity was sounded, yet that sublimity can take radically different, even diametrically opposed, forms: Beethoven the composer of variations has only Bach as a precursor. The transition to the fifth movement was impeccably judged; it is, of course, not quite a transition, merely the concluding variation, yet it sounded as such nevertheless. Beethoven’s kinetic energy in this ensuing scherzo movement could not help but put me in mind of the Ninth Symphony, yet the players reminded one that he is perhaps more elusive, and allusive, here. Execution, with one exception that merely reminded one that the performers were human, was well-nigh perfect, but not in a remote sense. I can say little of the sixth movement, other than that we stood on holy ground, clearly related to that of the ‘Praeludium’ from the Missa Solemnis. The finale intensified, contradicted, transformed, reinstated: the quintessence of late Beethovenian fugue. Bartók seemed almost faint-hearted by comparison.

Belcea Quartet - Beethoven, 1 December 2011

Wigmore Hall

String Quartet no.6 in B-flat major, op.18 no.6
String Quartet no.11 in F minor, op.95, ‘Quartett Serioso’
String Quartet no.12 in E-flat major, op.127

Corina Belcea, Axel Schacher (violins)
Krzysztof Chorzelski (viola)
Antoine Lederlin (violoncello)


The second concert in the Belcea Quartet’s Wigmore Hall Beethoven cycle threw down the gauntlet for subsequent instalments. To hear three such different quartets from different periods of the composer’s career offered variety, to be sure, but the connections one could make – and which, of course, the players, could and did make – were perhaps still more striking.

There have been a good few performances from the op.18 set in which I have felt a little disappointed, but not here. The Belcea enthralled not only in the lively, Haydnesque opening movement, with a touch of Mozart here and there, but also in subsequent intimations of what we have come to consider ‘late Beethoven’. That first movement set up a pattern not only for this quartet but for the recital as a whole, with its individual characterisation of first and second subjects bringing us not so very far from the Mozartian world of the opera house. It was graceful indeed; all I missed was a touch of Beethovenian gruffness – but then, I did not really miss it. The ‘Adagio ma non troppo’ sounded just as Beethoven marked it: a trickier task than it might sound. One might well have added ‘grazioso’ to the description too; in its easy flow, the music looked forward to the slow movement of the ‘Spring’ Sonata, arguably even to the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony. Yet the quiet drama of the theme’s development was the thing, vibrato varied accordingly – and convincingly. The whirlwind dislocations of the scherzo and trio, on the other hand, certainly peered forward to the ‘late’ composer, a proper contrast before the desolate Mozartian – even Wagnerian – music-drama of the introduction to the finale. Haydn then returned to view, to put a smile back on our faces, though not irreversibly, for the return of the introductory material once again pointed to the future, in this performance both rarefied and terrifying.

The first movement of the extraordinary ‘Quartett serioso’ moved us from intimations of ‘lateness’ to what seemed to be the real thing – despite the work’s chronological placing. Several times, I was put in mind of the Eighth Symphony, another work that stands upon the cusp. The Belcea players, greatly to their credit and greatly to the performance’s benefit, were not afraid to sound ugly; yet there was also plenty of room – insofar as there is room at all, in this world of breathtaking, almost Webern-like concision – for the sweetest lyricism, albeit always foreshortened, as Beethoven demands. One truly felt as well as observed Beethoven’s concision and its underlying anger. The ‘Allegretto ma non troppo’ received excellent characterisation throughout, ranging from more than a hint of that neo-Classicism that haunts the Eighth Symphony to near-operatic desperation. All was held together by Beethoven, but also of course by the performers. The scherzo and finale were unsparing, in the best sense, nervous intensity emerging from within, without a single break in the guiding thread.

Cross-fertilisation ensured that the first movement of op.127 sounded close to middle-period Beethoven in its forthrightness, the richness of Corina Belcea’s first violin tone certainly helping in that respect. Yet motivic concision retained the connection with the ‘lateness’ of op.95, alongside and in dialectic relationship with an almost ‘traditional’ expansiveness, for which consider other E-flat major works such as the Fifth Piano Concerto and Haydn’s late piano sonata. The slow movement, by contrast and by intensification, sounded ineffably ‘late’, its theme rapt in Gluckian ‘noble simplicity’, yet so much sweeter, both compositionally and instrumentally, and of course so much more developmental. The array of tonal qualities presented by the players almost made one experience the movement as akin to a Mahler symphony, a whole world in itself. Again, line was maintained throughout: inevitable, yet not without surprises. The motivic construction of the scherzo was lain out, for all its protean transformations, with exemplary clarity and, just as important, with dramatic meaning. If the trio exhibited a degree of savage wildness, it always knew – and the Belcea Quartet always knew – where it was going. In retrospect, it seemed but a stormy interlude, though it could not have been more real at the time. As for the ‘finale problem’ faced by every sonata-form composer since Mozart and Haydn, one was tempted to ask, ‘what problem?’ There was a struggle, as there must be, but continued alertness to the twin, dialectically-related demands of character and form made perfect dramatic sense. String quality was variegated, yet never for variegation’s sake, just like Beethoven’s writing itself. And then, to conclude, a touch more Haydn.

Prom 7: Belcea Quartet/Erben - Schubert String Quintet, 19 July 2011

Royal Albert Hall, London

Schubert - String Quintet in C major, D.956

Corina Belcea-Fisher (violin)
Axel Schacher (violin)
Krzysztof Chorleski (viola)
Antoine Lederlin (violoncello)
Valentin Erben (violoncello)

On the face of it, chamber music in the Royal Albert Hall is an absurd prospect, yet on several occasions, I have found the way an excellent group of players can draw one in to provide for a more satisfying, often moving, experience than a typical orchestral performance, which can undoubtedly suffer form the hall’s barn-like acoustic. So it was here: doubtless the players would have sounded different in, say, the Wigmore Hall, but I remained utterly convinced.

For this was a distinguished reading indeed of Schubert’s C major quintet, full of ambivalence, regret, and yet determination. Life in the inner parts, from the very opening of the first movement, reminded one that life more generally must go on – even if, in Schubert’s own case, it would not. Framed by an inevitably fragile sadness, which never tipped over into the lachrymose, one realised that both life and death came out of the music, rather than appearing as tacked on pseudo-autobiographical concepts. Some beautifully hushed playing drew one in, ever underpinned by the driving force of Valentin Erben’s cello. Length was heavenly and yet all too mortal: I wished the movement could go on forever, yet at the same time began to realise that it was lulling me, Erlkönig-like, to enter into something beyond: the Romantic seduction of death itself. That call became even more marked in the slow movement, taken at a judicious tempo that neither dragged nor skipped. The vital sense of a heartbeat persisted, though, in a performance that was quite simply flawless, though not of the skated-over, superficial variety one occasionally associates with certain other quartets. Schubert’s sighing phrases elicited from the Belcea players a longing that rightly extended beyond eroticism. There was, moreover, real, heartfelt anger to be heard during the central episode. But applause: after this of all movements?! The only word for it, or the only printable one, is barbarism.

The scherzo was possessed of a vigour it is tempting to describe as Beethovenian, whilst the melodic gift revealed was of course entirely Schubert’s own. Well captured indeed was the balance between sadness and stillness of the trio: chillingly so, suggesting a song without words that both horrified and consoled. Despite, or rather on account of, the excellence of execution, the finale sounded like an uphill struggle, or at least its attempts to dance did, rhythms requiring ever more effort to achieve that aching swing. But then, featherlight articulation took over, to take us beyond that – though to what? This was Viennese in the best sense: unheimlich, Schubert revealing something that was already denied to successors such as Brahms.

Bartók Day - The six string quartets: Belcea Quartet, 21 September 2008

Wigmore Hall

Corina Belcea-Fisher (violin)
Laura Samuel (violin)
Krzysztof Chorzelski (viola)
Antoine Lederlin (violoncello)

The Belcea Quartet’s survey of Bartók’s six canonical string quartets took the form of three concerts held throughout the day. Formerly the Wigmore Hall’s quartet-in-residence (2001-6) and with a recently released recording of the Bartók quartets to its name, the Belcea was an obvious choice for this duty and privilege. It did not disappoint.

In the first quartet (1908-9), we hear the emergence of Bartók’s individual style. One would probably guess that any given section was by the composer, but by the end one could be in no doubt. The Belcea Quartet’s reading therefore assumed an exploratory tone and set the scene for the ensuing performances: sounding both as one and as four. The work’s opening motif received an aptly lachrymose presentation, the music being developed with a sense of opening out. A passionate intensity marked the first movement’s middle section, inevitably making one recall Bartók’s unfortunate liaison with Stefi Geyer. The open-endedness of that movement was finely captured. In the Allegretto, we heard a rhythmic drive that never sounded merely brash; nor did it occlude Bartók’s characteristic melodic profusion. I felt that were odd moments early on in the finale when the players became a little too relaxed, but this was soon compensated for with truly energetic passion, not least upon the advent of its soaring Transylvanian theme. Thereafter no one could look back: Bartók’s voice had asserted itself once and for all. The second quartet (1915-17) received a reading that rightly emphasised its ongoing developmental qualities. Recapitulations were not merely different in their notes – they could hardly fail to be, given what Bartók had written – but they truly sounded different: possible only at the time of hearing, dependent upon what had come before. That to the first movement evinced a real sense of terror when we heard the four instruments in unison, swiftly followed by consolation. The final ’cello notes were duly haunting. What we might call Bartók’s ‘composed Arabism’ was very much to the fore in the following movement. This was never mere local colour but musical invention. There was a dreamy, Bergian middle section, which, splendid in its inevitability, paved the way for seamlessly handled, almost Carter-like metrical modulation. The frozen landscape of the closing Lento was captured perfectly: this was not to be thawed, but to remain desolate, although no less beautiful for that.

The opening bar of the third quartet (1927) announced a new world, unmistakeably Bartókian, yet closer to some – though by no means all – of the qualities of the Second Viennese School. In Adorno’s words, ‘What is decisive is the formative power of the work; the iron concentration, the wholly original tectonics.’ Webern came to mind in the shards of the Prima parte, whilst Schoenbergian ‘developing variation’ was heard on a broader temporal plane in this structurally impregnable account. Bartók’s tougher, more compressed style was never softened, enabling his violent lyricism to sing all the more freely. The pizzicato opening of the Seconda parte was superbly presented by ’cellist Antoine Lederlin; above all, it sounded so utterly melodious. Indeed, it was remarkable how Bartók’s melodies grew out of, rather than stood opposed to, the obstinacy of his rhythmic repetition. It was a hallmark of this performance and of that of the fourth quartet (1928), that any instrumental ‘effects’, for instance the passages played sul ponticello, were impeccably musical, sounding fully integrated into the composition. In lesser performances, they can sound too much in their own right, but not here. The fourth quartet likewise received a highly developmental reading. It may be composed on a larger scale than its predecessor, but this does not imply any loosening of construction. Its arch-form was rendered not only crystal clear but also powerfully inevitable. The intensity of the first movement’s coda was quite overwhelming, all the more so for being followed by the strange, muted whisperings of the second. In the slow movement that lies at the heart of the work, the folklike principal ’cello theme was impeccably ‘accompanied’ by the other player’s chords, leading us inevitably into the spellbinding world of Bartókian night music. It would be difficult to find any fault with the all-pizzicato fourth movement, whilst the powerfully projected Bulgarian rhythms of the finale never masked the strong thematic connections with the rest of the quartet.

And so to the evening concert, for the final two quartets. The Adornian ‘iron concentration’ of the fifth quartet (1934) is every bit as great as that of the third and fourth, but the Belcea Quartet managed to capture in tandem with this its more conciliatory features too, not least the persistence of its centring upon B-flat. Bach came to the fore in the flawless projection of the work’s mirror formation, but the reflections within that mirror ensured that this was no easy symmetry. The brazen fortissimo of the first movement’s central section pounded itself not only into one’s consciousness but also into the imagination. Night music was once again idiomatically captured at the heart of the following Adagio molto; the mystery and danger of the insect-like pizzicatos registered powerfully – and meaningfully. And in the fifth movement, the amusement of the banal hurdy-gurdy tune (con indifferenza) was apparent, without being made to stand out like a sore thumb. It is, after all, an inverted, diatonic relative of the movement’s opening theme. If Bach stands behind much of the fifth quartet, then Beethoven acquires the relative advantage in the sixth (1939). The transformative reappearances of the mesto introductory material to the first three movements were truly fulfilled in the entirely mesto finale, providing a culmination that not only evoked the celestial ecstasy of late Beethoven but also brought Mahler to mind. He had actually been there from the opening viola solo, performed with tender intimacy by Krzysztof Chorzelski and was apparent once again in the savagery of the Burletta. The destination was inevitable but this far from negated the horrors one might have to experience during the journey. And the final ’cello pizzicato statement of the mesto theme provided a wholly appropriate sense both of culmination and of open-endedness. These great works are inexhaustible, yet their depths were truly plumbed in the Belcea’s fine performances.