CANCELLED: Belcea Quartet

»There can be no lovelier music, at least not in this world – thus the Hamburger Abendblatt enthused about the Belcea Quartet, which has been a favourite with local string-quartet fans since its Beethoven cycle. This season the quartet is giving three recitals of the chamber music of Johannes Brahms, from quartet to sextet.

The centrepiece of their first evening is Brahms’s String Quartet op. 51/1. The 40-year-old composer had already written more than 20 string quartets at the time – all of which he destroyed because he wasn’t satisfied with them. »It’s not hard to compose, but it’s incredibly hard to sweep the superfluous notes under the table«, he once said. But with the intense C minor Quartet he pulled off an absolute masterpiece. Benjamin Britten’s First String Quartet picks up the reins, so to speak, where Brahms left off.

The British composer wrote the quartet in 1941 in the USA, where the convinced pacifist spent the war years to avoid conscription. Dmitri Shostakovich wrote the Quartet No. 14 in the last years of his life, considering which it exudes a surprisingly cheerful mood. The Belcea Quartet was founded in 1994 at London’s Royal College of Music by musicians from three countries: first violinist Corina Belcea comes from Rumania, while viola player Krzysztof Chorzelski is Polish. Both of them pursue successful solo careers parallel to their work with the quartet. The two Frenchmen Axel Schacher and Antoine Lederlin both studied at the Conservatoire de Paris, and are now soloists in the Basel Symphony Orchestra.