PERSPECTIVE — The Ariel Quartet, faculty quartet-in-residence at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (CCM), recently delivered an exuberant performance of Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 59, No. 2 (Razumovsky), as part of their own concert series. They attacked the dramatic opening chords with thrilling precision, a gesture that was then answered by a sweetly phrased theme, with Gershon Gerchikov in the first-violin chair. That sublime moment offered a hint of what was to come in the Molto adagio, one of Beethoven’s most profound slow movements. No one in the audience stirred.
The Ariel’s performance of this middle-period Beethoven quartet was a warmup for their second of three albums in a recording project of the complete Beethoven string quartets. The first installment is an engaging album of the six Op. 18 quartets, released digitally and on CD by Orchid Classics in April 2025. The middle quartets, which will include the three Razumovsky quartets, Op. 59, will come out in November 2025, with a third volume slated for June 2026. The award-winning ensemble plans to celebrate the cycle with a box set, to be released on March 26, 2027, the bicentennial of Beethoven’s death.
“Beethoven’s canon has accompanied our journey as a quartet from the very beginning and represents an integral part of our musical DNA,” said violist Jan Grüning, who joined the Ariel in 2011, just before the ensemble began its Cincinnati residency in 2012. “His music is one of the main reasons we do what we do.”
The Ariel Quartet — violinists Alexandra Kazovsky and Gerchikov, violist Grüning, and cellist Amit Even-Tov — formed in Israel in 1998. It is an ensemble that breathes and feels every note together. Yet the individual spirit and virtuosity of each musician is always evident. Perhaps it helps that three of its members grew up together. They began playing quartets around age 13 in a chamber-music class in their Jerusalem school, tackling Beethoven’s Quartet Op. 18, No. 4, as their first work. In Hebrew, the group’s name means “Lion of God,” one of the poetic names referring to Jerusalem.
All the musicians were born in 1984, including the Munich-born violist Grüning. Now turning 41, they are recording the complete cycle of Beethoven string quartets for the first time. Taking on such a complex project, a landmark in the life of any string quartet, marks a point in time. But today, besides artistic questions, there are other challenges, such as finding a label. They feel lucky to have aligned with Orchid Classics, founded by violinist Matthew Trusler in 2005, and also with the multi-Grammy Award-winning producer Jesse Lewis. The label is billed as “artist led, creatively driven.” Its artists include pianist Jonathan Biss, who has recorded the complete Beethoven piano sonatas.
The Ariel continues a tradition at the Cincinnati conservatory that started with the residency of the lauded LaSalle String Quartet (1946-87). Sealing that connection, LaSalle’s first violinist Walter Levin was in his 80s when he served as a mentor to the young ensemble, who played for his 90th birthday. Ironically, there is no evidence at the school that either the LaSalle or the Tokyo String Quartet, which subsequently was visiting quartet-in-residence for a decade, performed or recorded the Beethoven quartet cycle there.
As string quartets go, the Ariel is still young. The musicians were not yet 30 when they played their first Beethoven quartet cycle to packed houses at the Cincinnati conservatory in 2014. Now, with three members who have families — including Even-Tov and Grüning, who are married to each other — they juggle full teaching studios, their own rehearsals, and a busy international touring schedule, often with families in tow. That unusual closeness, sharing professional lives and raising children alongside one another, has resulted in a remarkable bond, both on and off the stage.
The Ariel’s repertoire is impressively broad, including five new commissions. The musicians regularly appear with other exciting young artists. In 2019, the ensemble performed the U.S. premiere of Daniil Trifonov’s Piano Quintet in D major, with the composer as pianist, for Cincinnati’s Linton Chamber Music Series. The recent program at the conservatory showcasing Beethoven’s Razumovsky Quartet Op. 59, No. 2, was bookended by Ernö Dohnányi’s two Piano quintets — No. 1, Op. 1, and No. 2, Op. 26 — and featured pianist Orion Weiss, a frequent collaborator. The group plans to record the Dohnányi, as well.
The group’s most recent CD release, a Brahms and Bartók album for Avie Records, was in 2018.
The first volume of the Beethoven cycle, starting with the Quartet in F major, Op. 18, No. 1, is instantly engrossing. This is early Beethoven, still under the influence of Mozart and Haydn. The ensemble’s counterpoint is clear and crisp, and balance is refined. But it is the musicians’ interpretive power that connects the listener, heard in the Mozart-like humor of their phrasing and in galvanizing tempos.
It is also unmistakably Beethoven. Even in these early six quartets, the listener can detect in the music’s ever-expansive themes and intensity that Beethoven was anticipating in his quartets to come. You need only hear the Ariel’s interpretation of the D major Quartet, Op. 18, No. 3, to understand the affection these players have for this music. The depth of their artistry is on display in the C minor Quartet, Op. 18, No. 4, where an aura of mystery keeps the listener riveted. In the finale to the Quartet in B-flat major, Op. 18, No. 6, the arresting sonority of Even-Tov’s cello colors the slow introduction, “La Malinconia” (melancholy). Her instrument, the “Margot Cello,” an 1842 Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume that survived the Holocaust, has its own deeply moving story.
Kazovsky and Gerchikov alternate in the first-violin chair, which lends an air of spontaneity to the ensemble’s live performances. The listener can only guess who is playing first in the recordings, although the violinists say they have divided them fairly equally. Each work has specific challenges. Kazovsky, who is playing first in the Quartet in C-sharp minor, Op. 131, mentally prepares for an endurance test. “Before I play the first note, I’m aware that we are just going to go until all seven movements are done, and we’re going to go through this huge and enormous experience,” she said. “I feel both excitement and the weight of that on my shoulders.”
The albums are being recorded in the conservatory’s intimate Werner Recital Hall, where the group also performs its concert series. The sound is warm and realistic, missing only the enthusiastic supporters who attend the quartet’s concerts.
The Ariel’s collaboration with Orchid Classics, a growing indie label, turned out to be ideal. The label’s catalog is robust, but until now, it lacked a Beethoven string quartet cycle. There is a trade-off in not signing with a larger label, which may have a wider reach but likely has several Beethoven surveys already in their catalog. “When you join a label like [Orchid], which is just people who are passionate about getting their recordings out and connecting with people in the industry and sharing what’s new and creating something individual, that was a perfect fit for us,” Grüning said.
And in producer Lewis, the quartet happily found a partner who is on the same page. “He’s more or less our age and really shares a vision for the flow of the music and really gets us,” said Grüning. “That’s very important for the continuity and the trust that what you want to hear comes out in the end.”
Beethoven’s 16 string quartets, like his symphonies and piano sonatas, revolutionized Western classical music. The quartets parallel Beethoven’s other musical monuments he composed during the early, middle, and late periods of his life. For performers, the challenges of playing the entire quartet cycle plus the immense single-movement Grosse Fuge, Op. 133, is akin to climbing Mount Everest.
Important Beethoven cycle recordings were always part of the Ariel’s journey. The recordings of the Cleveland Quartet, Amadeus Quartet, and Alban Berg Quartet are interpretations they revere. The three founding members recall the transformative moment as students when they received a box set of the Beethoven quartets by the Berg Quartet, a gift from their first quartet coach, violinist Avi Abramovich. They still look back to their early teacher, who instilled in them passion, discipline, and music making “that is meaningful, special, and magical,” Kazovsky said.
The Ariel Quartet was formerly the resident ensemble of the Professional String Quartet Training Program at the New England Conservatory, where the players earned undergraduate and graduate degrees. Their many prizes include the Cleveland Quartet Award from Chamber Music America (which resulted in their Carnegie Hall debut) and Grand Prize at the 2006 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition. The musicians are grateful to be carrying on a tradition that began with the LaSalle, whose visionary concerts added so much to Cincinnati’s chamber music culture. They are paying it forward by mentoring a rising graduate ensemble, the Poiesis Quartet, which was the Grand Prize winner of the Fischoff in 2023.
Over the years, playing the Beethoven quartets has been like “going back to old friends,” said Even-Tov. “When we rediscover those pieces together, there is always something new. There is always a layer. We feel like it’s just such an incredibly rich and deep repertoire that there is always something to discover.”
