Music Reviews : Emerson Quartet in Concert at Royce Hall

John Harbison’s music may or may not be programmatic--the composer isn’t telling--but it is certainly emotionally graphic.

The entire sweep of his recent Second String Quartet, which was introduced to Southern California by the touring Emerson Quartet Sunday afternoon in Royce Hall, UCLA, takes the listener on a tortured journey through a haunted psyche.

The atonal, often grating, work deals in depression, despair, night-thoughts and other downbeat moods. A thread of compulsion seems to tie it all together. There are no arid patches: Sadness flows into pessimism, violence and bitter resignation.

In addition, the piece is idiomatically and brilliantly scored. Here, it became brilliantly exposed, the four Emersonians--Philip Setzer, Eugene Drucker, Lawrence Dutton and David Finckel--giving it full expression with what impressed as a wide range of musical and technical resources.

Alas, two of the three remaining works on this generous program covered the same, sadness-inducing emotional ground. Bartok’s Third Quartet and Beethoven’s Opus 95 may have their strong differences with the new Harbison piece, yet each focuses closely on the same areas of feeling. As the end of the second hour approached, three tortured journeys in one afternoon began to seem excessive.

Nevertheless, the Emerson Quartet gave a set of convincing, bravura performances.

The program began almost lightheartedly, with Mozart’s K. 458, the so-called “Hunt” Quartet, in a handsomely paced, virtually immaculate reading which rang true in Royce Hall’s helpful acoustical ambiance.