Emerson’s Strings Sing Wondrously

The Emerson String Quartet’s latest local program could not have been more serious, yet neither heaviness nor overbearing sobriety marked the performance when the wonder-making ensemble opened the 96th season of Coleman Chamber Concerts in Beckman Auditorium at Caltech in Pasadena Sunday afternoon.

Musical substance in a sound-package of effortless instrumental virtuosity has long been the Emerson’s special achievement. This program--Shostakovich’s 14th Quartet, the Quartet No. 2 by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich and Beethoven’s Quartet in A minor, Opus 132--and its performance lived up to that standard.

The ingrained melancholia of Shostakovich’s 14th, illuminated by shards of hopefulness, opened the proceedings eloquently. Always role models of teamwork, the four players--violinists Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer, violist Lawrence Dutton and cellist David Finckel--nonetheless can proclaim their separate individualities. This work, of course, demands the most from the cellist, and Finckel rose to its myriad musical requirements with a sound of seraphic brilliance.

Zwilich’s high-lying, tension-defining Second Quartet, technically perhaps even more challenging than the Shostakovich, articulated the composer’s many complexities in a reading of utmost clarity. Just 10 months old, it appears a work of lasting beauties.

Probably the least conflicted of Beethoven’s late quartets, Opus 132 nevertheless reveals its secrets only with protracted exposure. This nuanced reading held the form and the content of the score up to close scrutiny, and one could sense more than usual its often-clouded continuity. The core of the piece is the Song of Thanksgiving, and in that, the ensemble delivered the heart of the whole.

By way of a bracing, brief and smiling encore, the Emersons played the third of Anton Webern’s Opus 5 Movements for String Quartet.