The Emerson Quartet gives its valediction as a vessel of vivid imagination
By Kyle MacMillan
Budapest. Guarneri. Juilliard.
Those are the names of three of the most celebrated quartets of the modern era, and most critics, chamber-music devotees, and fellow chamber musicians agree that the Emerson String Quartet deserves to be on that august list as well.
“When you think back to the great quartets in the last generations,” said noted cello soloist Gary Hoffman, who has performed with the quartet, “especially the American quartets, they have inherited that tradition and have definitely marked their era like those quartets did in theirs.”
The Emerson Quartet announced in August 2021 that it will disband in 2023 after 47 years on the road, performing its final concert in October that year in New York’s Alice Tully Hall. As part of what has become a kind of an extended farewell tour, the group will make its culminating appearance at the Ravinia Festival on June 28.
The festival figures prominently in the quartet’s history and vice versa. The Emerson has presented 30 concerts during 25 seasons at Ravinia between 1985 and 2019, the fourth most of any classical ensemble behind the Budapest, Beaux Arts Trio, and Tokyo String Quartet. Conversely, Ravinia third ranks in the Emerson’s American summer festival appearances just behind Aspen and Tanglewood.
“The places we have played often,” said Emerson violinist Philip Setzer, “and there are a lot of them, there’s a feeling when you walk out on stage. It’s like when you go over to a close friend’s house for dinner, and there are a lot of people there and you walk in and people just come up and hug you. That’s the sort of feeling walking out on the [Martin Theatre] stage at Ravinia. It’s a relatively small space, and there is an intimacy there and you can really see the people’s faces. We always feel welcome at Ravinia.”
Setzer recalls several times walking past Ravinia’s Pavilion on the day of concert with other members of the quartet and stopping to listen for a few minutes to a Chicago Symphony Orchestra rehearsal. “It was always very inspiring,” he said. He also remembers a dinner in 1999 with Christoph Eschenbach, following the Emerson concert in which the famed conductor served as the keyboardist for Mozart’s Piano Quartet in G minor, K. 478. In attendance as well was Kurt Masur, who had conducted the Chicago Symphony the night before, and part of the conversation focused on 20th-century Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich and his ambiguous relationship with Soviet authorities.
The Emerson was founded at New York’s Juilliard School in 1976, with two of its original members—violinist Eugene Drucker and Setzer—who are still in the group. Violist Lawrence Dutton joined in 1977 and cellist David Finckel came along two years later. That configuration, in which the quartet did the bulk of its recordings and for which it is best known, remained the same until 2013, when Finckel left to pursue other interests and Welsh cellist Paul Watkins took his place.
One facet of the Emerson that most strikingly sets it apart from other quartets was its decision to use rotating first violinists. Drucker believes it was the first professional ensemble to institute this approach, and it is certainly the most famous one. Most quartets are anchored by a dominant first violinist like Robert Mann, who served in that role with the Juilliard Quartet from 1946 through 1997, and who went far in shaping its sound and approach. “But for other players, other temperaments, I think it absolutely makes sense to have the switching of first and second violin,” Drucker said. In the case of the Emerson, said Marie Wang, second violinist of the Avalon String Quartet, which studied with the group both at the University of Hartford’s Hartt School in 1998–2000 and at the Ravinia Steans Music Institute in 1998, the alternating first violinists meant that its four players were all “very powerful individuals.”
“Every quartet has a very distinctive sound, character, and identity to their interpretations,” she said, “and when it comes to the Emerson, it’s their amazing brilliance of ensemble, the power of their sound, and their individualistic, solo kind of playing. I think it’s the norm now, and that wasn’t necessarily the case with other groups.”
The group is closely identified with the 15 string quartets that span Shostakovich’s career. When it first began performing a few of his works in the 1980s and ’90s, they were still seen as radical, tough sells. The Emerson presented the complete quartets in venues around the world starting in 2000 and released a recording of the complete set that same year, winning two Grammy Awards including one for Best Classical Album. Those landmark undertakings helped make the works a standard part of today’s string quartet repertoire.
The group similarly gained considerable attention for its 1990 recording of the six quartets by Hungarian composer Béla Bartók. But Hoffman, who returns this summer on the Ravinia Steans Music Institute faculty, does not believe those undertakings have in any way overshadowed its work with music from other periods and styles—more than 250 pieces in all. “I never really felt that there was repertoire that they were not at home in,” he said. “That’s the force of a great string quartet, to have the musical and technical wherewithal to deal all types of music.”
Along the way, the group has achieved enormous success, playing on many of the world’s most prestigious stages and collaborating with such famed soloists as soprano Renée Fleming and pianists Evgeny Kissin and Emanuel Ax. It also has amassed a catalog of more than 40 albums, with the prestigious Deutsche Grammophon label issuing a 52-disc box set to mark the quartet’s 40th anniversary in 2018, and more recordings are on their way. In all, the Emerson has won nine Grammy Awards, three Gramophone Awards and Musical America’s “Ensemble of the Year” Award.
“We had a really good run,” Setzer said. “We’re extremely fortunate that we got along as well as we did. We’re extremely fortunate to always have good management and very lucky to able to record as much we did during the golden age of classical music recording. We couldn’t make records fast enough for Deutsche Grammophon.”
The Emerson began discussing disbandment as far back as 2017, but it was not until 2019 that the group settled on 2023 as the final year. “It just felt like the right time,” Drucker said, “because we still feel like most of the time we can play our best individually and as a group, and we want to go out on a high note.” The three older members of the group are in their late 60s and early 70s and Watkins is 52.
Considering how many of today’s quartets break up before they even reach their 25th anniversary and frequently change personnel, the Emerson’s continuation of essentially its original configuration for 47 years (34 years with Finckel as cellist) is remarkable. Hoffman believes the group made smart choices right from the start, especially about how much time they would spend together. “I always felt like the Emerson Quartet had a very healthy and intelligent way of giving each other the necessary space and freedom,” Hoffman said, “and I think that’s also one of the reasons why they stayed together so long, because they understood how that would work best and what the pitfalls were.”
Most recently at Ravinia, the Emerson Quartet teamed up with soprano Renée Fleming (left), pianist Simone Dinnerstein (center), and actor Jennifer Ehle (right) to give the Midwest premiere of André Previn’s final work, Penelope, a concert drama setting a libretto by Tom Stoppard.
In the one and half or so years the Emerson has left, the quartet is working on a documentary about its history and is visiting many of the venues where it has performed in the past to say good-bye, and that is, of course, what is happening this summer at Ravinia. The quartet never performed a complete cycle of quartets by Shostakovich or Bartók at the festival, but it has presented wide panorama of works by famed composers like Beethoven, Haydn, and Schubert, plus less familiar works such as Wolfgang Rihm’s String Quartet No. 4 in 1992, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s String Quartet No. 2 in 1999, and Anton Webern’s Five Movements for String Quartet, op. 5, in 2001. A few milestones along the way include the group’s second performance anywhere of André Previn’s Penelope (2019), a hybrid vocal-theatrical work with Fleming, and Shostakovich and the Black Monk: A Russian Fantasy (2018), a dramatic work co-created by Setzer based on the music of Shostakovich. The Emerson will end its program in June with Schubert’s String Quartet in G major, a piece it has not performed in four or five years “Ravinia will be our coming back to that piece as well as the Brahms C minor,” Drucker said.
As the quartet winds down its performing, the players are having a mix of emotions. “There is a feeling that has been growing that it is the right thing for us to have decided, but it is becoming more real with every passing month, so that is not always a completely happy feeling,” Drucker said. On a recent European tour, the Emerson played Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” Quartet, which it hadn’t played in eight years or so, and those were its final performances of the beloved work, which it first tackled in 1977. Musicians develop a kind of relationship with certain pieces, he said, and he felt a pang of regret putting the printed pages of that work back into his music closet.
Although the Emerson is ceasing its performances, the group along with Finckel will continue to provide guidance to young string quartets through the Emerson String Quartet Institute at Stony Brook (NY) University. Indeed, it recently had a meeting with the chairman of the music department about the group’s teaching plans after October 2023. Several of the members have teaching affiliations with other institutions as well, including Watkins, who became a full-time professor at the Yale School of Music.
In addition to the Avalon, three of whose members returned to Ravinia this year for the June 3 concert premiering works by the 2022 winners of the Bridges Composition Competition, the Emerson has mentored such notable quartets as the St. Lawrence, Escher, and Calidore (which it partnered with at Ravinia in 2017 for a program of larger works). Wang of the Avalon Quartet has admired the Emerson since she, as a “geeky teenager,” saw the group perform on a chamber-music series in her hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia. “They just blew my socks off,” she said. “I just knew from then on that I really wanted to get into chamber music.”
By giving up performing, Setzer said, the Emerson will have more time and energy to passing along the quartet legacy that was handed down to the quartet by its mentors and which it has tried to uphold during its more than four-decade existence. “That’s not just something we want to do, it’s a responsibility to do that,” he said. He wants to share with his students, for example, stories about composers like Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg that he heard from famed violin pedagogue Felix Galimir. “We’re an important part of that continuing legacy,” Setzer said, “and I think we feel honored by that as much as we feel any kind of ego about it. We were in the right place at the right time.” ●
Kyle MacMillan served as classical music critic for the Denver Post from 2000 through 2011. He currently freelances in Chicago, writing for such publications and websites as the Chicago Sun-Times, Early Music America, Opera News, and Classical Voice of North America.