Stringing the Years Together

Not so long ago--or so it seems--the Emerson String Quartet was considered one of our finest young ensembles. But time happens. Opinion on the manifold merits of the Emerson has not changed, but the quartet of fortysomething boomers marks its 20th anniversary next month.

Not that its members are celebrating. November 1996 is, after all, only the first of several possible locations for that chronological landmark.

“Our beginnings are not easily definable to a single year,” violinist Eugene Drucker notes. “We evolved very gradually into a professional string quartet, from a student ensemble that Philip Setzer and I founded at Juilliard in the early ‘70s. We signed with professional management in November 1976, and since it was the bicentennial, we took the name Emerson, because that was an American name associated with culture.”

But the group’s first concerts booked by that new management did not take place until the summer of 1977, when violist Lawrence Dutton joined. The current cellist, David Finckel, did not enter the fold until 1979. So there are a number of options for dating the Emerson Quartet.

“I don’t know when our 20th anniversary will be--probably whenever we come up with a special program for it,” Drucker says with a laugh.

The early trickle of gigs, of course, has now swollen to a flood.

Drucker is speaking by telephone from his hotel in Germany, where the Emersons have five concerts, hard on the heels of a stint in Japan, where they presented the complete cycle of Beethoven’s 16 string quartets. Then it was back to the U.S. for Southern California performances last Thursday in Irvine and Saturday in San Diego. This afternoon, the Emerson opens the Coleman Concerts season in Pasadena with a Schumann-Janacek-Beethoven program. From here, the quartet returns to the East Coast, where composer and bassist Edgar Meyer joins it for the New York premiere of his bass quintet for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

However you count them, the years have been productive for the Emerson Quartet--17 years as artists in residence at the Smithsonian Institution, 15 years on the faculty of the University of Hartford’s Hartt School of Music, 10 years into a long-term recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon. Commissions and premieres include works by Ned Rorem, Wolfgang Rihm, John Harbison, Gunther Schuller and Mario Davidovsky. The quartet has performed benefit concerts for causes ranging from nuclear disarmament and the fight against AIDS to world hunger and children’s diseases.

The DG contract has produced a distinguished body of recordings, including a breakthrough cycle of the six Bartok quartets, which won the Grammy for best classical album and the Gramophone record of the year citation from the 1989-90 season--the first time either award had gone to a chamber music ensemble.

Before that recording, the Emerson had been playing the complete Bartok quartets in concert for several years, beginning at Lincoln Center in 1981 and making its Carnegie Hall debut with the Bartok six in 1988. The group likes to play all the Bartok quartets on the same program, in chronological order, creating both a compelling survey of the composer’s stylistic and technical development and an emotionally intense, six-act musical drama.

That is also how the musicians approach their current obsession, the Beethoven cycle. Or at least, that is how they do it in concert, where they present the 16 works in the space of a week.

Recording, however, has been another matter.

“Recording has never been quick, easy or efficient for us,” Drucker wrote in Strings magazine in 1993. “We view recording as taking the ultimate responsibility for an interpretation. . . . The search for an ideal representation of our concept of a piece is the fuel that keeps us going past the point of fatigue and routine.”

Initially, the Emerson hoped to record the Beethovens over a period of 13 months, but somehow that schedule doubled in length.

“It has taken somewhat longer than anticipated,” Drucker acknowledges. “We’re still in post-production, but the tapes I have heard sound wonderful. We’re supposed to be finished by November.”

In defense of the delay, Drucker notes that the group also recorded the late Shostakovich quartets in the middle of the process, live at the 1994 Aspen Music Festival in Colorado. The Beethoven cycle is due out early next year, with the Shostakovich to follow, and the Emerson will complete the whole Shostakovich cycle--also live in concert at Aspen--over the next few summers.

Accounting, at least in part, for the Emerson’s longevity and stability is the equitable division of the extra-musical chores: Setzer develops most of the programming ideas; Drucker, the group’s linguist, handles many of the interview requests around the world and writes program notes; Dutton oversees the financial affairs of their booming business; and Finckel supervises recording.

They also approach their music-making democratically; indeed, the Emerson is the best known of the few quartets in which the violinists rotate the first- and second-chair assignments.

“Phil and I split it as equally as we can, usually one for you, one for me,” Drucker says. “For example, I play first in eight of the Beethoven quartets, he plays first in another eight, equally divided among the early, middle and late quartets. He plays first in three of the Bartoks, I play first in three. Nobody’s a specialist.”

Does this risk giving the group a split personality?

“It might, to some extent,” Drucker concedes. “But to put it more positively, it gives an extra dimension to what we’re doing. It piques and sustains audience interest, and as a fringe benefit, sharing the greater demands of the first part allows us to do more repertory.

“The second part requires a different type of playing--certainly no less important, but I’m not going to pretend that we spend as much time practicing second parts as we do first parts. It may be only psychological, but there is more pressure to playing first. Because it is more exposed, people hold you more responsible for the interpretation, even in a group as egalitarian as ours.”

The repertory advantages of sharing the pressures of the first-violin part are understandable, given the quartet’s schedule. It presents at least 45 pieces every season, Drucker says, including four to six new pieces each year.

“I remember one tour where we did 23 different pieces in about two weeks--too much!”

Through all that music, the Emerson’s commitment to serious contemporary work is unwavering. But do not look to the group for any of quartet-dom’s trendier trappings, such as crossover arrangements, or even minimalism, amplification or lighting effects. Emerson performances are highly theatrical but in a purely musical way--big sound, dazzling virtuosity and an impetuous style reminiscent of the Juilliard Quartet, the Emerson’s mentor.

“If it expands the general audience for string quartets even a little bit, I’m all for it,” Drucker says of those developments fueling the current boom in string quartets. “But if the audience isn’t prepared for the immersion, the concentration, to hear Beethoven or Shostakovich on musical terms, then no gimmicks will help them with us.”

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EMERSON STRING QUARTET, COLEMAN CONCERTS Beckman Auditorium, Caltech, Pasadena. Date: Today, 3:30 p.m. Prices: $12 to $22.50. Phone: (800) 423-8849.