Page 220 - FINAL_Guildhall Media Highlights 2019-2020 Coverage Book

Belcea Quartet

© Marco Borggreve

What's your favourite occupation (when you're not playing viola, of course)?

Working with talented young quartets. And away from music: reading books. And even further
away from music: going for a morning run in the countryside.

If you could be any person in the history of music, who would you wish to have been?

Maybe Arthur Rubinstein? He lived the most wonderful, rich and seemingly happy life. My
favourite composers such as Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert had rather miserable lives – I am
not sure I would like to share any of their fates… But I would love to meet them!

What is your favourite quartet (or individual quartet movement)?

Beethoven Op. 131.

What has been your most beautiful concert?

It has to be SIX concerts: the complete Beethoven Quartet cycle we played at the Konzerthaus in
Vienna in May 2012. Ten days of climbing the musical Everest only yards away from where this
music was written – a real pinnacle of what a string quartet player could dream of.

What has been your greatest musical disappointment?

Receiving the score of a barely finished new quartet commissioned by us from a venerable
composer, only days before the scheduled premiere, and discovering that this long-awaited
masterpiece is… four minutes long.

If you were to be reincarnated as a musical instrument (not a viola), which would you
choose?

If I ever were reincarnated, becoming a musical instrument wouldn’t interest me at all. I think I
would like to become one of those amazing birds, whose song we spend our lifetime trying to
imitate.

What's your violist's motto?

Someone once told me after a concert: “It is touching to see that despite having such an
insignicant role in the quartet you seem to be enjoying yourself very much”. Since then my
violist’s motto is never to stop enjoying myself.