This is the first of Beethoven's three quartets commissioned by his patron, Prince Andreas Razumovsky, then the Russian ambassador to Vienna. Razumovsky, an accomplished amateur musician himself, kept three of Vienna’s most accomplished string players on retainer so that he could play second violin in quartets with them.

Deftly incorporating Russian themes, the Razumovsky quartets met with critical interest from the outset - "3 new, very long, and difficult Beethoven quartets . . . are attracting the attention of all connoisseurs. They are profoundly thought through and admirably worked out, but are not easily comprehended", wrote the famous Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung newspaper in 1807.

Come and see what you make of no.1!