The Belcea Quartet – violinists Corina Belcea and Axel Schacher, violist Krzysztof Chorzelski and cellist Antoine Lederlin – perform at Stockholm Concert Hall in April 2019
We have to be sure as a group what we want to achieve before we sit down to rehearse, ’ says Belcea Quartet second violinist Axel Schacher. With its members divided between Switzerland and the UK, the group does not have the luxury of an open-ended rehearsal schedule, but Schacher’s point applies equally well to quartets who do, he says. ‘Even if you’re all living and working in the same city, thinking before a rehearsal, “Oh, let’s just see where this ends up…” means spending twice as much time on achieving the same result.’
Founded in 1994 at the Royal College of Music in London, the quartet today comprises two original members, Romanian first violinist Corina Belcea and Polish violist Krzysztof Chorzelski, who were joined in 2006 by French cellist Antoine Lederlin and in 2010 by the Swiss–French Schacher. ‘We can’t afford more time or to keep changing our flights, ’ Schacher says, explaining how geographical inconvenience demands an efficiency that in his words appears to border on the utilitarian. ‘If we get to the end of a rehearsal and something isn’t right? Well, we have to deal with it one way or another.’