Belcea Quartet - Quartet in Residence

Key details:

Department:
Chamber Music
Role:
Quartet in Residence

Corina Belcea-Fisher violin
Laura Samuel violin
Krzysztof Chorzelski viola
Antoine Lederlin cello

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. Their principal teachers were the members of the Chilingirian, Amadeus and later the Alban Berg Quartet. The Belcea Quartet represented Great Britain 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. Subsequent recordings for EMI include Schubert quartets, Brahms’ String Quartet Op. 51 No. 1 and the String Quintet op. 111 with Thomas Kakuska, Fauré La Bonne Chanson with Ian Bostridge, Schubert’s Trout Quintet with Thomas Ades and Corin Long, a double disc of Britten’s string quartets and most recently Mozart’s “Dissonance” and “Hoffmeister” quartets. Their future recording plans 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. They regularly work with leading instrumentalists including Thomas Ades, Isabelle van Keulen, Michael Collins, Imogen Cooper, Piotr Anderszewski, Valentin Erben and Natalie Clein and singers including Angelika Kirschslager, Iain Bostridge, Simon Keenlyside, Lisa Milne and Ann Sofie von Otter.

The Quartet was appointed Quartet in Residence at the Guildhall School in 2006.

www.belceaquartet.com