Philharmonia Chamber Players: Beethoven & Shaw

Programme

Beethoven’s passion-fuelled String Quartet No. 15 brings this season’s Philharmonia’s Chamber series to a fulfilling and serene close.

Composed following a severe disease, Beethoven’s penultimate string quartet oscillates between optimism and grief. Listen out for the third movement, ‘the Holy song of thanksgiving’, for some of Beethoven’s most serene and vulnerable music, where his use of an archaic, Church-influenced tonal scale juxtaposes his unyielding sense of physical introspection and survival.

T.S. Eliot was so moved by Beethoven’s work that it inspired his poetic masterpiece Four Quartets, a meditation on human spirit, suffering, and the everlasting. The ageless, eternal themes of Eliot’s poem, where “time future [is] contained in time past”, flows through this concert’s programme, as Beethoven meets a composer whose string quartet premiered almost two centuries after his, with Caroline Shaw’s Valencia concluding this programme, and our chamber season.

Pop in just for this 45-minute concert, or stay to hear more Beethoven in his irrepressible Symphony No. 7, conducted by Manfred Honeck at 7.30pm (separate ticket required).