Two Violinists Power Emerson Quartet

The Emerson String Quartet is one of those groups in which the two violinists take turns in the prominent first chair. It makes a difference, apparently, because there seemed to be two different quartets performing music by Haydn, Shostakovich and Beethoven on Tuesday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

One wonders if the same thing will happen when the Emersonians open the Coleman Series at Caltech in Pasadena on Sunday.

With Eugene Drucker as first violinist, the Emersonians--including violinist Philip Setzer, violist Lawrence Dutton and cellist David Finckel--sounded beautiful, well-blended yet emotionally bland in Haydn’s Quartet in G, Opus 33, No. 5 and Shostakovich’s Quartet No. 4 in D minor.

When Setzer launched into one of the eastern Jewish dance themes in the last movement of the Shostakovich, however, one’s ears and heart took notice. This was, incidentally, the movement in which Dutton broke a D string. After he replaced it, the group began the movement again, with no mishaps.

The prospect of Setzer in the first chair in Beethoven’s Quartet in E minor, Opus 59, No. 2, after intermission, raised hopes that were not disappointed.

Here was a sense of a composer’s personal voice and drama that had been missing in the Haydn and Shostakovich. Beethoven wrote the work the year after he completed his opera “Fidelio,” but he wasn’t finished with its heroic tensions and conflicts. They recur here.

Even the quotation of a Russian folk theme, meant as a gesture to his Russian patron Count Razumovsky, who commissioned the Opus 59 quartets--the music is also known to us as the theme Mussorgsky uses to set the bells of Moscow peeling in “Boris Godunov”--can evoke Beethoven’s great democratic voicing.

Setzer’s playing invigorated his colleagues here, as well as when, returning to the evening’s first seating configuration, they played the Scherzo from Debussy’s Quartet as an encore.

The Irvine concert was sponsored by the Laguna Chamber Music Society and the Philharmonic Society of Orange County.

* The Emerson String Quartet will play Schumann’s Quartet in F, Opus 41, No. 2; Janacek’s Quartet No. 1 (“Kreutzer Sonata”), and Beethoven’s Quartet in E minor, Opus 59, No. 2 on Sunday at 3:30 p.m. at Beckman Auditorium, Caltech, Pasadena. $12-$22.50. (800) 423-8849.