The Belcea Quartet play Beethoven Op. 18 No. 1 and Op. 130 with the Grosse Fuge at Wigmore Hall on Friday 25 September 2026.
The Belcea Quartet formed at the Royal College of Music in 1994 under the leadership of the Romanian violinist Corina Belcea, was coached by the Chilingirian Quartet and then by the Alban Berg Quartet in Cologne, and was quartet in residence at Wigmore Hall from 2001 to 2006. Thirty years on it is one of the very few European quartets that has kept a first violinist and a founding identity across three decades of personnel change, and Beethoven is the ground it returns to.
The sixteen quartets are the summit of the form and the cycle is a quartet’s statement of what it thinks about music. This evening pairs the first with one of the last: Op. 18 No. 1 in F before the interval, and after it Op. 130 in B flat. They were among the first ensembles taken into the national new-generation scheme, from 1999, and made their Carnegie Hall debut in 2000.
They play Wigmore Hall on Friday 25 September 2026, and the choice that matters is the ending. Op. 130 was written to close with the Grosse Fuge, a fifteen-minute movement so difficult that Beethoven’s publisher persuaded him to replace it with something lighter. The Belcea restore the original in the year of its two-hundredth anniversary, which turns an evening of chamber music into an argument about what the piece is.