Proms Chamber Music (20.07.20) 2 Apollon Musagète Quartet 1.00 p.m.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Webern: Langsamer Satz
Colin Matthews: String Quartet No. 5 (European premiere)
Beethoven: String Quartet in D major, Op. 18 No. 3

Apollon Musagète Quartet

(From BBC Proms 2015, 3 August)

Former BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists the Apollon Musagète Quartet present the European premiere of the Fifth String Quartet by one of Britain’s foremost living composers, Colin Matthews. Commissioned for the 75th anniversary of the Tanglewood Festival in 2015, the piece remains the last work Matthews has written in the medium.

Bookending the Quartet are Webern’s youthful Langsamer Satz – an ecstatic piece that showcases the composer’s formal skill within a lyrical idiom – and Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 18 No. 3. Of Beethoven’s six Op. 18 quartets, No. 3 is both the lightest and the hardest to pin down: the scherzo is fleeting, and even the framing movements have an unusual delicacy and wistfulness about them.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Tomorrow lunchtime.

[bluestateprommer]

Thought I'd listened to this PCM 5 years back, but I didn't comment on it in the thread at the time, so I gave a 'fresh' listen last week. Very fine PCM, as is usual with this series, and excellent musicianship from the AMQ. Perhaps contrary to sentiments expressed in the 2015 thread, I have no issues with the choice of the Webern Langsamer Satz at all as an opener. The main work of interest was the Colin Matthews Quartet No. 5, as the concert's novelty. At admittedly just one listen (maybe my 2nd overall), my sense was of a work that kept starting and stopping, and re-starting and re-stopping, something that cannot be said of either the Webern or the LvB. But maybe I'll give CM's work another listen later on.