Prom 31, Royal Albert Hall, London

Thrilling precision

You might not think there would be the makings of a successful concert in a solo violist and a chamber orchestra of 18 string players performing five pieces well out of the mainstream – most of them arrangements and three explicitly funereal – in a hall manifestly too large for a group their size. But Yuri Bashmet's visit to the Proms with his Moscow Soloists was heard out in attentive silence by an admittedly thin audience and acclaimed with real enthusiasm. Small wonder: he made us listen, good and hard.

There seems to be an unlimited supply of little-known music from Britten's precocious teens to pop up for first performance every other year. The opening item, Two Portraits, first heard in 1995, was composed in 1930, when he was 17. These two highly contrasted pieces deserve to be far better known: the spare sonorities of the first sound like a contemporaneous piece of Hindemith, and the second, with a bashfully tender solo viola (Britten's own instrument), is as close as he ever came to English pastoralism. And both demonstrate his preternatural understanding of string textures.

Hindemith himself next, with – astonishingly – only the second-ever Proms performance of his Trauermusik, written in 1936 in London when it was announced that George V was dead. Hindemith sat down and in six hours produced this understated tribute, which he broadcast the day after. Bashmet gave it a profoundly moving performance.

What followed went deeper still: an adaptation by Alexander Tchaikovsky (no relation) of Shosta-kovich's 13th String Quartet for viola and strings. It's perhaps the bleakest thing he wrote, when he was staring the certainty of death in the face. The frequent chordal writing in Shostakovich's quartets often suggests small string orchestras, with the result that they often respond well to transcriptions. This arrangement adds weight to the original, but it makes for disturbing listening: almost half an hour of Adagio, as bare as Arctic wastes, only occasionally enlivened by ripples of movement. The music holds the soul in an icy grip: it's one of the most harrowing things I've ever heard.

Bashmet's next reminder of mortality was Britten's Lachrymae, variations on a Dowland theme that emerges, as tardy consolation, only at the end. After such unremitting gloom, Tchaikovsky's Souvenir de Florence burst on the ears like sherbet on the tongue, the virtuoso string-writing underlining the breathtaking precision of the Moscow Soloists, in intonation as well as rhythm. It's so rare to hear such exact ensemble playing that sends a thrill through you.