Emerson Quartet Plays Irvine Barclay : The ensemble opens chamber-music series with vastly different works by Shostakovich, Webern, Mozart and Sibelius.

The Emerson String Quartet ventured a similar approach to four vastly different composers Thursday in a program that opened the second season of a series jointly sponsored by the Laguna Chamber Music Society and the Orange County Philharmonic Society at the Irvine Barclay Theatre. Not surprisingly, the players got very different results.

Throughout, emphasis was on reticent voicing, pressureless bowing and articulation and limited dynamic range. All this worked to the advantage of Shostakovich’s Quartet No. 7 and Webern’s Six Bagatelles, Opus 9. But it was far less satisfying in Mozart’s Quartet in D, K. 575, and Sibelius’ Quartet in D minor (“Intimate Voices”).

Shostakovich’s short quartet traverses a range of tender, poignant and agonized emotions, as would be expected because it is dedicated to the memory of his first wife, Nina Varzar. But it also moves from the personal to the political, with private loss evolving into a denunciation of the composer’s time. At least it did in the carefully calibrated and ultimately triumphant interpretation by violinists Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer, violist Lawrence Dutton and cellist David Finckel.

At first, one wondered if the players were sufficiently dramatizing the music, despite the sweet-sour nostalgia initiated by Drucker and the imminent dread and threat in the motor rhythms played by the others. But the issue completely fell to the players’ favor with the vivid rage of their overlapping, protesting voices at the start of the final movement, the ghostly waltz memories that followed and their gentle way with the final consoling chords.

Webern’s compact work, lasting all of about three minutes, gave them sympathetic opportunities to evoke the most subtle, breathless tone paintings, yet charge them with expressive meaning.

With Setzer in the first violinist position, however, Mozart’s K. 575 unfortunately emerged merely as a delicate, small-focused work. The players were best in evoking a tender nobility at the start of the Andante and in their light attacks in the Menuetto. But otherwise they were deficient in drama, contrast, brightness and charm, and tolerated sloppy articulation and unattractiveness of tone.

Sibelius composed his quartet between his third and fourth symphonies, prompted by what he feared was a life-threatening illness. Fortunately, it wasn’t. Nor in the hands of the Emersonians did the slow movement, said to contain the anguish he was feeling, emerge as much more than sadness. Indeed, it verged perilously close to bathos. Generally, however, the musicians addressed the work with consideration but could not make a strong case for it.

As an encore, the Emerson played the presto from Beethoven’s Quartet No. 13.