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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
October 20, 2004
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By Michelle Dulak Thomson
String quartets generally go for individuality of parts or for control and blend; and on the control-and-blend side the most
prominent American exponent is the Emerson Quartet. The two violinists (Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer), who trade places as
first and second, sound eerily alike (rather too much so, to my mind), but they are both brilliant players. Add a cellist (David
Finckel) who, as Bay Area residents will know from his frequent recital appearances here, is a first-class soloist, and a violist
(Lawrence Dutton) who is certainly one of the finest quartet violists in the world, and you have a New York-based quartet that more
scrupulous writers than I have had trouble refraining from comparing to the NY Yankees. That wouldn't be kind or, for that matter,
fair at the moment, but there is something in the sleek ensemble sound, the technical ease, and the sense of everything having been
calculated to a hair that makes the, well, New-York-ness of the Emersons hard to overlook. So it was at their recital Wednesday
night at Stanford's Dinkelspiel Auditorium, under the auspices of Stanford Lively Arts.
Things did not start off particularly well. The Emersons' peculiarly muscular conception of Mozart strikes me as badly
miscalculated, and K. 387 (the first of the "Haydn" Quartets) suffers more than most when approached their way. It was, of course,
brilliant quartet playing in the technical sense. It was generally faithful to the letter of the score, which is an unusually
flighty one for Mozart — lots of sudden dynamic shifts, lots of strange byways and abrupt turns. (I did notice, though, that
the Emersons were reluctant to play really quietly anywhere in the piece, even though there are more pianissimos here, if memory
serves, than in any of the other five "Haydn" Quartets.) But it was too sturdy, too pre-programmed. The essence of this music is
whim, contingency; this performance gave the impression that a meteor obliterating the Hoover Tower wouldn't have deflected it
much. The finale, where the fugal structure supported the Emerson approach somewhat, came off best; but even there there might have
been some plain fun to go along with the neat and vigorous counterpoint. You hit the closing theme and realize, with a small
shudder, that the Emersons just don't know what "opera buffa" is.
Britten's Second Quartet, by contrast, was obviously comfortable territory. The continuing neglect of the Britten quartets by non- English ensembles still puzzles me. The Third (a very late piece) has taken off in the last decade or so, but the other two numbered ones (there are yet other, earlier ones, as well as a few smaller pieces for quartet, also early) haven't become popular. It is strange, because they're both extremely attractive music, full of striking ideas and textures, and not particularly astringent harmonically. The First, with its four compact, polished little movements, is the easier of the two for players and audience alike, but the Second is the richer and the more complex, and the Emersons did it proud. It has a strange structure: a taut, condensed first movement whose formal cleverness would be annoying if the material weren't all so danged interesting; then a tauter scherzo with a deranged, somewhat bluesy trio section all of whose material comes (that cleverness again) from the scherzo itself. And then a finale longer than both put together — a vast "Chacony" (the spelling is a homage to Purcell) on a bizarre ground bass that begins in B-flat and ends in C. Oddly enough, over the course of fifteen minutes or so, one can get used to that. And within there is any amount of variety — of texture, of harmony, of leading voice. There are cadenzas for cello, viola, and first violin breaking up the structure neatly — Britten sure did have a tidy mind — but in a good performance you are struck by the trajectory of the thing even while it gives you a chance to admire the construction. And this was a good performance. Not utterly immaculate — even the Emerson chops didn't preclude a misstep or two in that fiendish Scherzo — but finely controlled and very powerful where power was needed. Eugene Drucker played first here (Philip Setzer had led in the Mozart), and his account of the double-stopped violin line of the Scherzo's Trio was possibly his finest playing of the night, gritty without being self-consciously "vulgar." And the Chacony built up marvelously over its long span, intense and minutely gauged. I don't want to slight the first movement, either; the recapitulation, where Britten throws together three themes he'd laid out separately early on, suddenly and all together, was as splendid a stretch of controlled mayhem as I've heard from a quartet in a long time.
After intermission came the Brahms Piano Quintet, with Jeffrey Kahane. I am now a little abashed to confess that I knew Kahane primarily as the uncommonly interesting Music Director of the Santa Rosa Symphony; I knew that he was a pianist, but certainly not that he could play as he did Wednesday night. It was a brilliant performance: powerful, but never in the least "bangy"; subtle, agile, expressive, infused with keen intelligence everywhere. It was not always in perfect sync with the quartet, but I don't know who or what to blame for that. (The stage-hands evidently thought the quartet would be sitting down for the second half, removing Finckel's platform and lowering all the stands. When the players came on, they put the stands back up, and Finckel did without the platform; but the configuration they ended up in was very spread-out, with Dutton in particular awfully far from everyone else.) Here as in the Britten, the Emersons found it in them to play very quietly, possibly following Kahane's example (he has an uncanny knack for clean articulation in very soft playing), but on the more conspicuous occasions when major volume was required, it was there in plenty. There was an encore: a deft rendition of the scherzo of the Dvorák A-major Quintet, with Setzer switching over again to first violin.
(Michelle Dulak Thomson is a violinist and violist who has written about music for Strings, Stagebill, Early Music America,
and The New York Times.)
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Emerson Quartet