Ariel Quartet Plays Late Beethoven

This interview can also be heard on WETA Virtuoso on the following times:

10/26/2026 9:01AM
10/28/2026 5:59AM
10/29/2026 20:59PM
11/1/2026 6:58AM

This month – October 2026 – marks the 200^th anniversary of the composition of Beethoven’s final complete work, the String Quartet in F major, Op. 135, and next March is the 200^th anniversary of his death. These milestones are part of the reason for the timing of the release of the third and final volume of Beethoven’s quartets by the Ariel Quartet. The cycle has gotten rave reviews in many publications including Gramophone and The New York Times.  

The Ariel Quartet was founded in 1998, when its members were teenagers. In 2012 they began their ongoing relationship with the University of Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music, where they serve as faculty quartet-in-residence. That was also the year the quartet had its only personnel change to date when violist Jan Grüning joined the group. He’s definitely committed to it, since he’s married to its cellist Amit Even-Tov and they have three daughters, whom the two violinists, Gershon Gerchikov and Alexandra Kazovsky, know very well. It’s a very tight-knit ensemble – which one has to be to tackle Beethoven’s late quartets. 

They are almost frighteningly intimate. It’s telling that after his twin peaks - the Missa Solemnis and the Ninth Symphony - works that required some of the largest musical forces that had ever been assembled up to that time – Beethoven spent the three years remaining to him composing one last cycle of string quartets. It’s a true cycle, with shared themes and references across all five works: the Quartet in E flat, op. 127; the Quartet in a minor, op. 132, which contains the sublime Heiliger Dankgesang (“Holy Song of Thanksgiving”), a musical prayer of gratitude for surviving a severe illness; the Quartet in B flat, op. 130, a massive work in six movements that the Ariel plays with its original finale, the Grosse Fuge, which gave its first listeners a kind of sneak preview of the quartets of Bartok and Shostakovich they would not live long enough to hear; the Quartet in c sharp minor, op, 131 a cyclic work in seven uninterrupted movements that Beethoven declared was his greatest composition; and the Quartet in F major, op. 135, an unexpected return to Haydnesque dimensions, but underneath its classical surface is a work just as deep and mysterious as the others – the finale is based on an inscrutable motif that Beethoven indicates is supposed to evoke the phrase “Muss es sein?” (“Must it be?”), ending his body of work with what is either a profound existential question or a silly joke, or both. (The Ariel decided not to include in this set the alternative finale to op. 130, but they have indicated that it will be included on an upcoming album.) 

The Ariel Quartet has been playing the late quartets since the beginning of their career, and one can tell; they fully inhabit this music which they know as well as they know one another.