MUSIC REVIEW : Emerson Quartet Opens Ford Season

To open what has become one of our most civilized and welcome summer rituals, Chamber Music at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, the Emerson String Quartet on Monday offered a cohesive but risk-filled program of works by Mozart, Shostakovich and Schumann.

The risks had to do with how much introversion the outdoor venue would tolerate and project, what with the omnipresent freeway noise, the rowdy blue jays, the helicopter overflights.

Well, the breezes that can waft the song of the big rigs right into your ears were flowing in the opposite direction, and the jays ceased their squabbling with the first Mozartean downbeat (the sunset helped, too). The helicopters, alas, visited on no fewer than five occasions.

The Emersons--violinists Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer, violist Lawrence Dutton, cellist David Finckel--proved equal to all comers, playing with their characteristic purposefulness, expertise and, on this occasion, dramatic punch. The often weepy, close-to-the-vest Mozart Quartet in D Minor, K. 421, was delivered with uncommon speed (the first movement for once taken at the allegro clip demanded) and rhythmic tension.

Shostakovich’s relatively genial, underemphatic Ninth Quartet--note how this composer has come to occupy what used to be the Bartok spot on the program--might seem an equally chancy work for the outdoors, but not in the Emerson’s grippingly taut, impeccably detailed and, finally, theatrical reading.

Schumann’s A-minor Quartet is the sort of extrovert material ideally suited to the surroundings, but here, ironically, there were problems.

The moonstruck adagio was taken at a pace sufficiently slow to approach inertness, while the finale was such a headlong dash that its innate friskiness was trampled in the rush to the finish--a remarkably clean-textured finish, nonetheless.

Bartok appeared at encore time: the pizzicato movement of his Fourth Quartet, played with wit and relish.