MUSIC REVIEW : Emerson Quartet Packs Second-Half Punch

The Emerson String Quartet is not a group that warms up with the opening work on its program. The players come fully prepared to honor their audience and their music, as was again the case on Sunday for their appearance in Beckman Auditorium at Caltech to open the 90th season of Coleman Chamber Concerts.

That they--violinists Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer, violist Lawrence Dutton, cellist David Finckel--were in peak form might, however, not have been as apparent as in previous encounters, what with the long pre-intermission portion of Sunday’s program devoted largely to half-baked juvenilia by composers who had much more to offer in their maturity.

Webern’s String Quartet in One Movement (1905), a stupefyingly downbeat choice for an opener, recalls Schoenberg’s “Verklarte Nacht,” but without the tunes, while Charles Ives’ benign, hymn tune-based First String Quartet (1896) only fleetingly hints at the quirky, interesting Ives to come.

The two large pieces were separated by the hyper-familiar Adagio from Samuel Barber’s String Quartet, the whole of which the Emersons play at least as well as any group before the public today and could have played on Sunday.

The post-intermission portion took the unintended form of a reward to the audience for bearing with the earlier doldrums: a gloriously strong--immaculately balanced, elegant in tone, meditative, muscular where appropriate--performance of Beethoven’s E-minor Quartet, Opus 59, No. 2, the second “Rasumovsky.”

The darkly sweet song of the slow movement has rarely to these ears sounded with such contained fervency. And on this occasion, an unprogrammed da capo --the result of a broken viola string--allowed us to hear the movement nearly through twice. A blessing rather than a disruption.