Tightrope-Walking With Disciplined Strings

Discipline shone throughout the concert of the Emerson String Quartet on Thursday night at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. Together, Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer--who share the positions of first and second violinist--violist Lawrence Dutton and cellist David Finckel created an ensemble of virtuosic command.

But the skill of the players was not the single defining aspect of this event, part of the Founders Hall chamber music series, nor has it been the key to the reputation they have carved out in their two decades together.

Every note the group played teetered between technical control and emotional abandonment, and it is this mixture of perfection and personal risk that gives the Emerson its unique personality.

In Beethoven’s String Quartet in A, Opus 18, No. 5, the musicians united for rhythmic synchrony, precise articulation and intricacies of dynamic nuance. Beyond that, even the most elegant, finished phrases of Beethoven’s early quartet seethed with a sense of submerged passion, a discourse among intimate confidants drawn to an inevitable goal.

The foursome brought a raw edge to its energy for Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8 in C minor, Opus 110, attacking the work with biting tone and fierce accentuation, exploiting its grotesqueries, hurtling through its explosiveness, etching tortured lines with weighty sadness.

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Beneath the sizzle simmered a level of concentration that focused both detail and direction. These musicians listen. They listen to their own lines, to the relationship of each note to the ones before, to the ones after and to the fabric of the whole. They understand the value of silence. They can and--particularly in the chorale-prelude centerpiece of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 15, in A minor, Opus 132--did find reverential communion by delving into subtle shades at the quiet end of the dynamic spectrum.

As encore, the Emerson offered a fleet, pointed reading of the Scherzo from the Quartet in F, Opus 135, Beethoven’s last contribution to the genre. The concert lasted more than two hours, but it ended too soon.