Debussy & Szymanowski: Quartets – Belcea Quartet

“This is the new recording we have been waiting for. Three years after Brahms (ALPHA792), the Belcea Quartet returns in a new formation: Suyeon Kang, their new second violin, joined the quartet in 2023. Today the Belcea Quartet presents a new recording of the Debussy Quartet — which they had previously recorded on their very first album 25 years ago — and two quartets by Karol Szymanowski, a composer they are particularly fond of and who possesses a unique and immediately identifiable musical language. The first quartet was composed in 1917 but the Russian Revolution intervened; its premiere finally took place in 1924. Szymanowski — then a world-renowned composer and a leading figure in the reconstruction of musical life in the young Polish Republic — wrote his second quartet ten years after the first in 1927; it was premiered in Warsaw two years later. “