The brilliant Chiaroscuro Quartet focuses on historically informed performance practice. In one area, the musicians will not imitate their authentic predecessors: Beethoven’s premieres were plagued by too few rehearsals. Opus 127, the first of three commissioned works by the Russian aristocrat Galitzin, was important to Beethoven. The Schuppanzigh Quartet turned the primal performance into a farce. For today’s string quartets, perfection is the benchmark: not as an end, but as an indispensable means of conveying the grandeur of the composition.

A guide to life, this is how many musicians see Beethoven’s late string quartets. This music is so incomprehensibly good that, as a player, you can hardly get a grip on it. You keep trying, the road to performance is as important as the sounding result. Beethoven captures the essence of existence in these monumental works. At the peak of his powers, he produced wonders of the world.