The Belcea Quartet restored Beethoven’s Op. 130 to its original, forbiddingly difficult ending, the Grosse Fuge, at Wigmore Hall.
The Belcea Quartet, formed at the Royal College of Music in 1994, played Beethoven at Wigmore Hall in Marylebone on Friday 25 September 2026.
Their founder, the Romanian violinist Corina Belcea, still leads them as first violinist. The Chilingirian Quartet and then the Alban Berg Quartet in Cologne coached them.
From 1999 they were among the first ensembles taken into the national new-generation scheme, and they debuted at Carnegie Hall the year after. They were quartet in residence at Wigmore Hall from 2001 to 2006, and Beethoven is the composer they keep returning to.
The programme paired the first of Beethoven’s 16 quartets with one of the last. Op. 18 No. 1 in F came before the interval, and Op. 130 in B flat after it.
Beethoven wrote Op. 130 to close with the Grosse Fuge. It was so difficult that his publisher talked him into replacing it with something lighter.
The Belcea restored the original ending in the year of the fugue’s 200th anniversary, so the evening heard Op. 130 as Beethoven first wrote it.