On Demand Concert: Rush-Hour Lates with Brodsky Quartet – Beethoven Opp. 135 & 133, live performance in Hall One at Kings Place, Sat 31 Oct, 2020.

Ticket holders will be able to watch the performance from 12:01am on Mon 1 Mar until 11.59pm on Mon 15 Mar 2021. For information on how to use KPlayer please refer to our guide or see the KPlayer FAQ.

‘The Brodskys’ ability to communicate on so many levels – humanity and virtuosity all part of the essential integrity of their approach…’ The Guardian

In this special Beethoven 250 anniversary series, the acclaimed Brodsky Quartet perform Beethoven’s late string quartets, one at a time, lovingly set up with musical preludes.

Op. 135 is the surprise finale of the late quartets, a work of classical proportions which radiates good humour and acceptance: Beethoven singled out his opening motifs and wrote, ‘Must it be? – it must be.’

Mendelssohn’s touching little fugue provides an ideal preface to Beethoven’s towering masterpiece, the original last movement of Op. 130, Grosse Fuge. The composer’s greatest assault on the form, this ‘great fugue, part free, part worked-through’, is an edifice of extreme disjunction, unmeasured pauses and unrelieved ferocity.

As Stravinsky judged it: ‘this absolutely contemporary piece of music that will be contemporary forever’.

This event was part of the Beethoven 250 series at Kings Place.