Emerson Quartet Conveys Shostakovich’s Power

“My symphonies are tombstones,” said composer Dmitri Shostakovich. So too is his Quartet No. 13, played with deep insight and impact by the Emerson String Quartet as the midpoint of a three-part program Friday in Founders Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

It took only a few of the opening notes from violist Lawrence Dutton to establish the bleak personal and political panorama, which testifies at great pain to the composer and listener of a terrible, if nameless, event.

When violinists Philip Setzer and Eugene Drucker and cellist David Finckel joined Dutton, the anguish and emptiness multiplied and deepened into epic proportions, veering into a dance of madness as if the composer’s consciousness were trying to ward off awareness.

It is difficult to avoid using such metaphors in speaking of the music of Shostakovich--so powerful, authentic and conscience-stricken. And so authoritatively and imaginatively played here by the Emerson musicians, who had recently completed a five-concert series of the composer’s complete quartets in New York.

With Drucker shifting to the first chair position held elsewhere in the program by Setzer, Debussy’s Quartet in G minor proved a startling balm, perhaps the only answer possible, to Shostakovich’s work. Debussy’s verdant musical intoxication, played with impassioned power and sweetness by the quartet, evoked poet Dylan Thomas’s line about the irrepressible life-assertion of nature--”The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”

The musicians opened the program with a dramatic account of Haydn’s serious and complex “Fifths” Quartet, Opus 76, No. 2. They played the fourth section (Sehr langsam) of Webern’s Five Movements for String Quartet as the single encore.