Emerson String Quartet May Need Touch of Thoreau

No one, as far as I can tell, has ever made a study of how the name of an ensemble might affect its development. But the thought occurred Sunday afternoon while the Emerson String Quartet performed the opening program of this season’s Coleman Chamber Concerts in Beckman Auditorium at Caltech: Might America’s leading string quartet have become a little more free-spirited if it had chosen, 20 years ago, that other Transcendentalist, Thoreau, when it was looking for a suitably American name during the bicentennial?

Emerson was a preachy moralist of high ideals, and the Emersons fulfill that mission nicely. For Sunday’s program they laid out monuments of Western culture with great respect. They gave us Beethoven’s second “Razumovsky” Quartet, Opus 59, No. 2, shined up with spit and polish. They produce a fleshy tone, and they made very sweet work of the lovely details in the slow movement. They took those wrenching syncopations in scherzo with the confidence of a smooth, well-oiled machine. They dashed through the finale like a team of perfectly synchronized horses able to follow the most treacherous routes at great speed.

Janacek’s heartbreaking First Quartet--a musical drama inspired by the domestic violence of Tolstoy’s novella “Kreutzer Sonata,” which itself alludes to Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata for violin and piano--has maybe never sounded more beautifully integrated than it does in the Emerson’s hands. If the ensemble has plenty of flesh and muscle for Beethoven, for Janacek it has a tone as fine as marble. Thus those harsh strokes that obsessively interrupt great lyric moments become not so much irrational passion as expressive veins in expensive stone.

Schumann’s seldom-heard Quartet, Opus 41, No. 2, which opened the program, is less interesting music than Janacek or Beethoven, but, ironically, the Emerson made it sound almost better. It is lush romantic music, and that is all the players need for placing the listener in a lush sonic world.

These were, thus, beautiful pictures all. But Emerson, the philosopher, regularly chided himself for falling in thrall of such beautiful art. He ultimately mistrusted art and turned against it, calling paintings and the like “toys” that at best could train eye and ear to better sense raw nature. And this, of course, is not the easiest model to follow for a string quartet that fears to tread into the modern age.

Still, the Emerson has not always been quite so unimaginative as it sounded Sunday. The members--violinists Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer, violist Lawrence Dutton and cellist David Finckel--practice a democratic ideal and share the first-chair duties, which seems to help keep the ensemble in outstanding technical shape. But fame and middle age seem to have made it sedate. Even their latest recordings on Deutsche Grammophon sound overstuffed.

But what proved particularly distressing on this occasion was the sheer remove of both the string quartet and its presenters from their environment, and from Emerson’s progressive side. Neither the music (none of it new) nor the music making (far too comfortable) had a sense of discovery about it. And this presented at an institution famed for its profound inquisitiveness!

The Coleman Chamber Concerts is a noble institution now--remarkably, in its 93rd season. It serves well a loyal audience that is warm and attentive. But even so, it seemed Sunday as far removed from its host institution as the Emersons did from nature. There were few young faces or even middle-aged faces. There was no sense of that lively interchange between music and science that one finds at, say, MIT, Caltech’s East Coast competitor, where progressive composers are on the faculty, and where concerts are varied and spunky occasions.

I wonder if a Thoreau Quartet might not have filled more of those empty seats in the back with some of the important wonderers about nature who were on campus all around us but who were not much with us.