Belcea Quartet

Belcea Quartet is one of the world’s foremost string quartets. They have visited Konserthuset Stockholm several times before, including a series of concerts presenting all of Beethoven’s string quartets. At this concert, they have chosen to allow the quartets of Joseph Haydn and Leos Janácek to reflect one another. 

Haydn experimented early on with form and content, and sought new ways forward. He was also extremely prolific and composed over sixty string quartets.  At this concert, we will hear pieces composed by a mature Haydn. When he composed the collection Opus 33, he was nearly fifty years old, and the quartets of Opus 76 comprised the last quartet collection he wrote.

Here the music of Haydn, which is classical in every sense, is layered with Janácek’s resounding dramatizations. Janácek’s String Quartet No. 1 was inspired by the Tolstoy novel The Kreutzer Sonata. Tolstoy had in turn been inspired by Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata for Violin and Piano. 

String Quartet No. 2, which he called “Intimate Letters”, is about his last love, Kamila Stösslová. At that time, Janácek was just over seventy years old and his compositions were imbued with utterly unprecedented sincerity and passion.