The Emerson Quartet declines to say good-bye

Eugene Drucker, David Finckel, Lawrence Dutton and Philip Setzer - the Emerson String Quartet.

The Emerson String Quartet has a devoted Boston following, but their recent Celebrity Series concert (their 20th, not that anyone's counting) sold out, I think, for a more poignant reason: cellist David Finckel (second from left, above) recently announced he would be departing the group, so this would be the last local appearance of a beloved ensemble that had endured for over thirty years.

But the Emersons are far more devoted to philosophy than sentiment, and share a quietly cooperative ethos (Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer often trade off as first violin), so Finckel's farewell was left unmarked in Jordan Hall last weekend (even though his replacement, Paul Watkins, has already been announced).  Of course given the quartet's namesake - whose system of thought is all about transcending the flux of the world through a self-aware practice - I knew any acknowledgement of Finckel's departure would be understated.  Still, I did think it would be there - Finckel's farewell isn't quite like Setzer replacing Drucker as lead - and so I have to say its lack struck a curious note of aloof diffidence.  Which, come to think of it, has every now and then haunted the ensemble's performances, too.

Curiouser still, the program felt slightly themeless, even though it all hailed from the later days of the romantic movement (and the encore hailed from the moment it transmuted itself into modernism).  The opening choice, Dvorak's Quartet No. 9 in D Minor, seemed to slightly misfire - its sprightliness (it features a polka rather than a minuet) isn't really the Emerson's strong suit (you don't turn to them for a chuckle).  But the surprisingly rich Adagio at the work's center came off quite well, and there was likewise much to admire in the Schumann quartet (in A Major, Op. 41) that followed - particularly the surging "sighs" of the second movement.  Like much of Schumann, this quartet begins to drift a bit, but it comes to a rousing, almost manic, close, which the Emersons essayed with fervor.

The second half of the concert was entirely given over to Brahms' sprawling Quartet in A minor (Op. 51, no. 2), which always gleamed with an assured sense of ensemble - even in its thickest textures - but perhaps only intermittently caught fire.  Most of those moments actually came from Lawrence Dutton on viola, but the entire ensemble did shine in the wonderful Andante moderato - thirty years together have made a subtly balanced musical unity almost automatic for these four men - and once more the finale was truly arresting.

The crowd roared for an encore - perhaps even a solo from Finckel? But what we got instead was a curiosity - the gnomic, otherworldly third movement of Webern's Five Movements for String Quartet, a work so brief (thirteen measures) and so self-consciously distilled that it all but defies interpretation at a first hearing.  It's also all but emblematic of the moment that the Viennese school over-thought itself into musical gnosis (which perhaps highlighted again the Emersons' essential introspection).  Of course, if you believe - as they apparently do - that Webern epitomizes "everything romanticism was leading to," then the choice probably resonated.

But I don't.  So I just waved David Finckel good-bye by myself.

Hails and farewells from the Emerson String Quartet

The Emerson String Quartet

Last Friday Celebrity Series welcomed the Emerson String Quartet (above) in what felt a bit like a farewell concert - although it was really only a farewell to cellist David Finckel, who will be leaving the ensemble next year (he will be replaced by Paul Watkins).  So it was no surprise the program brimmed with other farewells - it featured Haydn's farewell to the string quartet (Op. 77, No. 2), as well as what unexpectedly turned out to be Beethoven's farewell to everything, the String Quartet in F Major, Op. 135, No. 16.  The concert was balanced by one big "hello" - the rolling premiere of Thomas Adès' The Four Quarters, which was commissioned for the Emersons by the Carnegie Hall Corporation.

Needless to say, the performance gave poignant, persistent evidence of why people are already feeling nostalgic toward this quartet's current line-up (which has endured for more than three decades).  The maturity, the insight, the passionate detail, the confident, unspoken sense of ensemble - it was all there, again, just as it always is with the Emersons.  The opening Haydn was particularly delightful - it played as a rich, perhaps slightly rueful emotional statement with a buoyant chuckle rippling just beneath its surface.  Propelled by Eugene Drucker on first violin, the opening Allegro moderato was exquisitely Mozartean (scholars claim it quotes the "catalogue aria" from Don Giovanni), while the following Menuetto proved deliciously playful - and the indispensable Finckel's cello all but bounced through the final Vivace assai.  To be honest, I felt this was the quartet's finest playing of the night (but then this is one of my favorite quartets, too).

Next came the Adès, which perhaps inevitably sounded a bit thin when sandwiched between late Haydn and Beethoven.  I'm generally a big fan of this challenging composer, but I have to admit - I think this may be one of his minor works; it  comes with an overt metaphoric program, but not much of a developing intellectual one.  Still, time will tell, and the audience certainly seemed to warm up to it (but then it gets better as it goes along, too).

As usual for Adès, Four Quarters is built on extremes of tone and dynamic, and depends on a certain alienated formal precision.  It's also a clear meditation, like La Mer and other works, on specific times of day; the first movement, Nightfalls, sets strange booms of sound against a kind of low, dreaming bass; something (perhaps human consciousness) is collapsing here into a sleepy drone.  In contrast, the following Morning Dew (excerpt below) is a spiky wake-up call of pizzicato effects, with plucked strings conjuring dozens of droplets precipitating out of the atmosphere.  This isn't too far from Brian-Eno-level electronica, however, where the concept does most of the heavy lifting; and the churning Days likewise plays like a self-conscious, but rather obvious, chunk of pop.  Adès only really gets down to work in the finale, The Twenty-Fifth Hour, which both hints at some mystical limit beyond the scope of our daily lives, and actually gets somewhere musically, too, thanks to a gracefully building contrapuntal development.



After Adès it was on to Beethoven, and what the master didn't realize at the time would be his last completed piece, Op. 135, No. 16. The work is famous for the inscription on its final movement, “Muss es sein? Es muss sein” (“Must it be? It must be”), which is perhaps not so much a reflection of the great composer's awareness of his impending mortality (he had a number of projects cooking at the time of his death, including a 10th symphony) as some eerily prescient, half-comical accidental portent.  The Emersons seemed to take the piece as mostly another of the composer's meditations on the pleasures and limits of classicism; with Philip Setzer on lead violin,  the Allegretto and Vivace were elegant, but not deep - depth came later, in the third movement, which touched here and there on the spiritual transcendence that illuminates the other late quartets; but this was shaken off again in a vigorous final Allegro.

After tumultous applause, the Emersons returned for a single encore, the first movement of Ives' First Quartet, generally known as the "Salvation Army" quartet.  This proved everything it should be: affectionately parodic but eventually affirming, and tossed off with the Emersons' usual low-key mastery.  It was hard to bid them (and especially cellist Finckel) farewell after that, I admit - but perhaps we're only on the verge of an exciting "hello," and another dazzling career phase, for this stellar ensemble.

The Emerson String Quartet (above) has been playing together for - well, actually for only thirty-three years, but considering the group has never suffered a single change in personnel*, it probably counts as the Methuselah of string quartets (particularly when other venerable musical partnerships, like the Beaux Arts Trio, have been taking their final bows). Its violinists, Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer, both studied under the same teacher (violinist Oscar Shumsky), so their connection goes back even further. When the Emersons (who named themselves after the great Ralph Waldo) begin to play, you sense immediately that everything that needed to be worked out between them was settled long ago. Long ago. As in eight Grammys ago (the number the quartet has been awarded - soon, perhaps, to be nine, as their current album, Intimate Letters, has been nominated).

And for their Celebrity Series concert last weekend at Jordan Hall, the Quartet dipped into the well of music they know extraordinarily well - the Ives Quartet No. 1, "From the Salvation Army," (for which they won a Grammy in 1993), the Shostakovich Quartet No. 9 (another Grammy win in 2000), and Janáček's Quartet No. 1, "The Kreutzer Sonata" (currently nominated). They also threw in the original quartet setting of Barber's Adagio for Strings as a crowd pleaser, I suppose.

These were clearly performances - and interpretations - long set in stone, but none sounded rigid, or in any way dusty. After better than three decades, the Emersons are still engaged, with both the music and each other - still, they don't exactly do passionate battle onstage (even though only cellist David Finckel remains seated; the rest stand). And frankly, they don't do irony, either: the opening Ives quartet, "From the Salvation Army," sounded almost as earnest as Copland, even though it takes its source material (several popular hymns - the piece is subtitled "A Revival Service") and deconstructs them with blithely cool arrogance. The quartet played the piece flawlessly, but frankly there's a sense of journey here - a voyage from familiar harmonic uplift into some larger, colder musical space - that the Emersons simply didn't seem inclined to take.

They were far more convincing in the Janáček, which is structured like a kind of opera, with leitmotifs that criss and cross each other in a steady build into tragedy (it's modeled on Tolstoy's classic account of jealousy, "The Kreutzer Sonata," itself inspired by the Beethoven piece). This was great music-making, and great drama - although Janáček hardly matches the moral complexity of the original novella. Tolstoy's POV is the jealous husband's, who is eventually acquitted of the murder he commits (but is nevertheless obsessed with forgiveness); Janáček's is the brutalized victim's, led astray by the sinuous themes of her seducer - a violinist, appropriately enough for a string quartet - and pursued relentlessly by a clutching, scratching, nearly demonic voice. The Emersons kept the intensity of the later movements rising, inexorably, even in the andante sections, so that the final blows, and eventual regret of the murderer, were devastating.

What followed - after lead violinist Drucker traded places with Setzer (another Emerson tradition) was a lovely, but inherently anticlimactic, rendering of the Barber Adagio. It seemed an odd choice at this juncture in the program, but as it's one of the most luminous stretches of melody ever composed, I confess I'm always happy to hear it.

The quartet's intensity returned (and then some) with their final offering, Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 9. Here everything seemed to fall into place, from the mournful phrases of the opening Adagio to the menacing cackles and dancing chases, flecked with both the comic and macabre, of the later movements. Indeed, the Emersons threw themselves into the work's nearly-infernal frenzy with such force that violist Lawrence Dutton broke a string with one violent pizzicato (the frenzy resumed after a moment's pause for repairs). This was merely the outer sign of a thrillingly fierce performance that brought the audience to its feet. The group returned for a single encore, a lovely setting of a Dvořák song. After the fury of the Shostakovich, its gentle lyricism was most welcome.

[*Note: I've been informed that the Emerson at its inception briefly played with a different cellist and violist, so the current line-up is only thirty, not thirty-three, years old. Point taken!]