Proms 2015 Proms Chamber Music 3: Webern, Colin Matthews & Beethoven

The Apollon Musagète Quartet – former BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists and eloquent champions of contemporary music – makes its Proms debut, bringing the European premiere of the Fifth Quartet by one of Britain’s leading living composers, Colin Matthews – a work commissioned for the 75th anniversary of the Tanglewood Festival. It is paired with Webern’s youthful Langsamer Satz, an ecstatic piece that showcases the composer’s formal skill within a lyrical idiom. Of Beethoven’s six Op. 18 quartets, No. 3 is 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.

There will be no interval