Stirring finale to Beethoven festival

The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Beethoven Unbound festival -- actually two festivals that formed bookends around the winter season -- ended over the weekend with some reshuffled programs by the orchestra and fresh quartet material.

In October, the Juilliard String Quartet was featured in the festival’s chamber concerts. So it seemed fitting that its preeminent stylistic heir, the Emerson String Quartet, would pick up the thread in May. The programming formula followed the series’ pattern, mixing more or less contemporary works with those of Beethoven.

In the second of their two programs at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Friday night, the Emerson Quartet reached for a composer who is neither as fashionable nor as “classic” as others in the series. He is Nicholas Maw, a Briton now teaching in Washington, D.C., who ignores trends and tempers his rigorous language with a fondness for long-limbed melody over often-huge time spans. His biggest “hit,” “Odyssey,” might be the longest single movement (95 minutes!) ever written for orchestra.

Maw’s String Quartet No. 4 -- commissioned by the Emerson Quartet and unveiled in February -- is another of his expansive structures, a 22 1/2 -minute single movement packed with lush, dissonant yet non-intimidating textures, big thrummed chords and a grand symphonic climax.

Before and after Maw, the Emersons opted for opposite ends of Beethoven’s quartet cycle, first the early, classical Quartet No. 6 and finally the Quartet No. 12, whose imposing opening chords form the gateway to the late quartets. Violinists Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer and violist Lawrence Dutton continue to play standing up, as they have since their experience in the theater piece “The Noise of Time” a few years ago (cellist David Finckel remains seated, of course) -- and they seemed willing to exchange a bit of precision and tonal warmth for deeper insights into the music, nicely sprung rhythms and touches of rough humor. The slow movement of the Quartet No. 12 fared the best -- serene, lacerating, reaching transcendence.

They saved their best for the encore, the scherzo from Shostakovich’s Quartet No. 10, which ripped along with a fury that surpassed anything I’ve heard from even their finest renditions of the composer’s work. It was as if the pent-up energy from Beethoven and Maw was released in a gusher of nervous fire and bile.