Belcea Quartet LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN The Complete String Quartes

Alpha is reissuing the complete Beethoven quartets by the Belcea Quartet : ‘Beethoven’s music has been at the center of our life as a quartet from our very first rehearsal together back in 1994. However, it is more recently that we immersed ourselves totally in Beethoven in preparation for, and during the course of the immense project of performing and recording all of his string quartets in the season 2011/12. It is during this past year that Beethoven’s music became an allconsuming passion for each of us.

These sixteen quartets written some two hundred years ago form one the most complete and powerful musical statements ever made. The completeness lies in their unprecedented intensity and in the astonishing development that can be traced between the early and the late works – a thirty-year long revolution which altered forever the way we experience music.’

CD 1-CD 2 / CD 3-CD 4 / CD 5-CD 6 / CD 7-CD 8 

Belcea Quartet BARTÓK String Quartets 1-6

"The more we immersed ourselves in these works, the more beauty and richness we discovered in them and we very much hope that this appeal will even still increase in future because we definitely consider these quartets to be the greatest masterpieces of the last century in our repertoire." Belcea Quartet

The First Quartet is the most romantic in spirit and actually harbours a love story. It marks an affectionate withdrawal from a late Romantic fin-de-siècle. The Second (1915-1917) takes us some way towards the gritty, hard-hitting Bartók of the mid-late 1920s. By 1927 Bartók, a superb pianist by any standards, was enjoying a worldwide concert career, and soaking up what that world had to offer in musical terms. One probable influence was Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite, an expressive masterpiece that thrives on a plethora of complexities. Bartók’s Third Quartet does likewise, a work that on one level seems to mimic a Hungarian rhapsody (the alternation of fast and slow music) while on the other takes tiny thematic cells and develops them into a teeming nest of musical activity. Bartók’s next two quartets are both cast unconventionally in five movements of a symmetrical, arch-like design. The Fourth (1928) has at its centre an evocative though austere example of Bartók’s ‘night music’ that opens with a rhapsodic cello solo leading in turn to imitated birdsong. The Fifth Quartet (1934) is built on a far larger scale. Bartok modifies the arch form by placing a scherzo at its centre, a syncopated dance movement in Bulgarian rhythm, framed by two slow movements using similar chord sequences. The air of ineffable sadness that hangs over Bartók’s last quartet (1938) reflects not only a swiftly sickening Europe but personal tragedy: his mother’s journey towards death would end in December 1939. All four movements open with the same, heart-rendering ‘mesto’ (sad) motto. Never has a quartet cycle ended quite so equivocally, or sounded a truer warning, one that even today inspires both awe and gratitude.

Belcea Quartet / Piotr Anderszewski SHOSTAKOVICH String Quartet No. 3 - Piano Quintet

Shostakovich is something of a departure on disc for both the Belcea Quartet and Piotr Anderszewski but a very welcome one. These two works have long been in their concert repertoire and it shows. They look at the Quintet with fresh eyes and that is evident from the outset. The pianist’s opening soliloquy has power and a directness of emotion, which is matched by the Belcea, but it’s at the point where the music moves into 3/8 (a minute and a half in) that this performance becomes a real ear-opener. How much wistfulness they find here, and Corina Belcea’s tone as she reaches heavenwards is utterly heart-rending. The Takács with Hamelin tend to be more straightforwardly warm at this point.

The fugal second movement has a particularly engaging fragility, Corina Belcea laying the subject bare with the merest touch of vibrato, which is then matched unerringly by fellow violinist Axel Schacher. There’s grim playfulness in abundance in the Scherzo, Anderszewski bright-toned but never aggressive-sounding, while the shocking torpor of the fourth movement is even more strikingly conveyed than in Argerich’s wonderfully responsive performance with Capuçon et al. The Intermezzo was a particular highlight of the Hamelin/Takács performance but this new performance is on a similar level. Anderszewski and the Belcea perfectly capture the finale’s unsettling mix of quasi-innocence and dark intensity, though if you want something altogether more sharp-tongued, more threatening, Argerich and friends are pretty much unbeatable.

The Third String Quartet is every bit as successful, setting off with an almost Prokofievian sense of the dance. The absolute certainty of ensemble is one of the joys of the Belcea, but just as important is their fearlessness, and their reactivity, capturing the music’s emotional shifts unerringly. How deliciously insouciant, for example, are the last two notes of the first movement, a mood immediately shattered by the stridently insistent motif with which the viola launches the second movement; or the contrast between chordal writing and poignant recitative of the fourth. The Belcea are a shade slower than the Emerson, not only here but throughout the quartet, and it makes for a more interesting reading; in the grimly violent third movement, for instance, the Belcea find more grit in the mix, while the Americans sound just a tad relentless. Shostakovich’s finale maintains the intensity of the previous movements and the Belcea respond in kind. A tremendous addition to the Shostakovich discography. (Harriet Smith / Gramophone)

Belcea Quartet JANÁCEK - LIGETI Quartets

Formed in 1994 at the Royal College of Music in London, the Belcea Quartet already has an impressive discography, including the complete Beethoven string quartets (ALPHA262). For this new recording, the ensemble has chosen three quartets by two iconic composers of the 20th century: Leos Janáček and György Ligeti. Fifteen years after their first recording for Zig-Zag, and after some changes in personnel, they have decided to record again the two string quartets by Janáček. The First Quartet was inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s famous novella, The Kreutzer Sonata: the fourmovement work follows the narrative, including its culminating murder. The Second Quartet is subtitled Intimate Letters, in homage to Kamila Stösslova, with whom the composer had an important relationship expressed through letters, one that influenced both his life and his music. Finally, the First Quartet by Ligeti, subtitled Métamorphoses nocturnes because of its particular form. The composer described the work as a sort of theme and variations, but not with a specific theme that is then subsequently varied: rather, it is a single musical thought appearing under constantly new guises – for this reason the word ‘metamophoses’ is more appropriate than ‘variations’.

Belcea Quartet / Till Fellner BRAHMS String Quartets & Piano Quintet

Brahms wrote three string quartets – or rather, he wrote three string quartets that he liked enough to let us hear them: we’ll never know how many were burned and abandoned along the way. The survivors are outpourings of angst, ardency and resolute jubilation, all characteristics that the Belceas do brilliantly. This recording features intense and wonderful quartet playing: lucid and agitated, sleek and muscular, with Corina Belcea’s silvery-lean first violin sound balanced by the huge warmth at the centre of the ensemble from violist Kzystof Chorzelski. In the Piano Quintet, pianist Till Fellner’s light touch makes him less of a soloist, more of an integrated texture – he’s a good match for the Belceas in that respect, but it feels like he’s responding rather than instigating. Some listeners might reasonably like their Brahms with a burlier kind of pianism. (Kate Molleson / The Guardian)

Liza Ferschtman / Het Gelders Orkest / Kees Bakels FELIX MENDELSSOHN Violin Concerto, Op. 64 - String Octet, Op. 20

Liza Ferschtman:….slowly, as my musical path kept unfolding, I got to the point where more and more I was able to let go of my preconceived notions about the Violin Concerto and more clearly start to see and hear my own voice in it. Over the years I got to know so much more music by Mendelssohn, from the inside out, and I felt the language become more fully my own. When working with Kees Bakels on it a couple of years ago things started to really fall into place, and last May when performing it with the Arnhem Philharmonic I really was all of a sudden struck by a distinct feeling that I can only describe as falling in love all over again with this magical piece. Certain details in the score seemed to appear completely new to me and the idea of approaching the work with the same collaborative energy as in chamber music made me experience it completely afresh. The combination of passion, grand emotions and at the same time lightness and elegance, such characteristic traits for Mendelssohn, fell completely into place. To feel this way about such a familiar piece was revelatory and I knew I wanted to share these discoveries, if you like, with many more people.