Comp.string Quartets: Belcea Q

Bartok String Quartets 1-6
Belcea Quartet

Established whilst studying at the Royal College of Music in 1994, the Belcea Quartet has quickly gained a reputation as one of the world's leading chamber ensembles. They represented Great Britian in the ECHO Rising Stars series and were selected for the BBC Radio 3 New Generations scheme from 1999 to 2001. They won first prizes at both the Osaka and Bordeaux International String Quartet Competitions in 1999 and the Royal Philharmonic Society's Chamber Music Award in both in 2001 and 2003.

In 2001 the quartet began an exclusive recording contract with EMI and won the Gramophone Award for the Best Debut Recording. Their future recording plans for EMI include the complete Bartok quartets.

The Belcea Quartet’s international engagements take them to the Vienna Konzerthaus, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, Brussels’ Palais des Beaux Arts, New York’s Carnegie Hall and the Chatelet in Paris and to festivals including Luberon, Istanbul, Trondheim, Lausanne, Salzburg and the Schwarzenberg Schubertiade. In the UK they regularly appear at the Bath, Petworth, Cheltenham, Aldeburgh, Perth and Edinburgh festivals and at Wigmore Hall where they were resident Quartet from 2001 to 2006.

Bartok CD reviews

For any quartet they represent a huge challenge, musically and technically. With their outstanding pedigree already firmly established, the Belcea Quartet have certainly earned the right to put their accounts of these key works onto disc...technically, these performances are impeccable, without a trace of insecurity... This is especially true of the First, unfolding with the same rapt care that the group would take over Beethoven's Op 131, which haunts so much of it, and the Third, in many ways the most elusive of the six, but here made to seem totally coherent and vividly plausible. The Second and the Fourth are, in their different ways, equally impressive. The lusher sound-world of the Second is particularly well caught..
Andrew Clements, The Guardian, 25 January 2008

Still a young group, the Belcea Quartet play Bartók's six masterly string quartets with the passion, technical command and folk inflections that most musicians only dream of. Having a Romanian-born leader helps, but each player shades in a thousand colours and sings out the peasant rhythms, giving full vent to Bartók's dazzling emotional kaleidoscope. These are thrilling performances, bound for classic status.
Geoff Brown, The Times, January 18, 2008

'Bartok's six quartets form the fundament of the early-20th-century quartet repertoire, so it's not surprising that the Belcea Quartet, among the finest of their generation, should have joined the ranks of those who have ascended this particular Parnassus and tackled the challenge of recording the cycle. The result is a sequence of confident, knowing, unfailingly rewarding accounts. The Belceas' style remains fundamentally youthful, yet they also offer spacious, expressionistic playing of enormous power and warmth where necessary, capture the evocative night music and scuttling, eerie scherzos of the Fourth Quartet to perfection, and embrace the late-Beethovenian scope of the Sixth with telling wisdom.
Stephen Pettitt, The Sunday Times, January 20, 2008

Firmly established as a keystone of the chamber repertoire, less than a century after they were written, Bartok's string quartets cover an enormous range of musical territory. From the romantic First to the overwhelmingly lachrymose Sixth, via a labyrinth of technical mastery and music complexity, Bartok shows himself intent on updating it for his own times and beyond. Recognising their importance, the Belcea Quartet lavish their own considerable skills on these masterly works in a two-disc set that deserves to win awards.
Anthony Holden, The Observer, January 20, 2008

Disc 1:
1 String Quartet No.1: I. Lento 9:50
2 String Quartet No.1: II. Poco a poco accelerando al Allegretto 11:70
3 String Quartet No.1: III. Allegro Vivace 10:35
4 String Quartet No. 3 Sz85: I. Prima parte: Moderato 4:40
5 String Quartet No. 3 Sz85: II. Seconda parte: Allegro 5:21
6 String Quartet No. 3 Sz85: III. Ricapitolazione della prima parte: Moderato - Coda: Allergo molto 4:49
7 String Quartet No. 5 Sz102: I. Allegro 7:38
8 String Quartet No. 5 Sz102: II. Adagio molto 6:00
9 String Quartet No. 5 Sz102: III. Scherzo (Alla bulgarese) & Trio 4:54
10 String Quartet No. 5 Sz102: IV. Andante 5:17
11 String Quartet No. 5 Sz102: V. Finale (Allegro vivace) 6:53

Disc 2:
1 String Quartet No. 2 Sz67 (Op. 17): I. Moderato 10:30
2 String Quartet No. 2 Sz67 (Op. 17): II. Allegro molto capriccioso 7:46
3 String Quartet No. 2 Sz67 (Op. 17): III. Lento 8:21
4 String Quartet No. 4 Sz91: I. Allegro 6:10
5 String Quartet No. 4 Sz91: II. Prestissimo, con sordino 2:55
6 String Quartet No. 4 Sz91: III. Non troppo lento 5:59
7 String Quartet No. 4 Sz91: IV. Allegretto pizzicato 2:47
8 String Quartet No. 4 Sz91: V. Allegro molto 5:49
9 String Quartet No. 6 Sz114: I. Mesto 7:39
10 String Quartet No. 6 Sz114: II. Mesto 8:40
11 String Quartet No. 6 Sz114: III. Mesto 7:11
12 String Quartet No. 6 Sz114: IV. Mesto 6:39

Belcea Quartet
Corina Belcea-Fisher - Violin
Laura Samuel – Violin
Krzysztof Chorzelski – Viola
Antoine Lederlin – ‘Cello