Kosmos Kammermusik: Belcea Quartet

Beethoven composed 16 string quartets, over a quarter century he developed the genre from the succession of Haydn to works reaching far into the future. In Beethoven's year 2027, the Belcea Quartet and the Quatuor Ébène will perform all quartets – not chronologically ordered but so that different creative phases stand side by side. In this concert, the Belcea Quartet will play besides an early piece and the second 'Rasumowsky-Quartet' also a work that Beethoven never wanted to play publicly as he wrote in a letter in 1816: namely the 'Quartetto serioso'. It is an experimental, compressed work with a record-suspicious short (and record-suspicious explosive) first movement – luckily it has already been played publicly.