The first unusual thing you may notice about the Emerson String Quartet is that its three higher string players perform standing, with the cellist seated behind on a riser.
The second difference, far more important to the musical experience, is the way the musicians listen to each other while playing. It’s more than a matter of precision of rhythm, entrances and cutoffs. It’s nuance, tone color and sensitivity to which member has the more important line at any given moment. This equality of purpose extends to the point that violinists Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer alternate in the first chair position.
The Emerson Quartet, which opened Chamber Music Pittsburgh’s season in Carnegie Music Hall Monday, was formed in 1976, with the above violinists and violist Lawrence Dutton. Cellist Paul Watkins joined the ensemble in 2013. The group’s unanimity and high technical accomplishment was immediately evident in the opening Haydn Quartet (Op. 76, No. 4).
It’s nicknamed the “Sunrise” Quartet because it begins with the lower strings sustaining a chord while the first violin plays a rising melody that blossoms into a sprightly theme that dominates the opening movement. Intonation must be perfect and the pulse precise to make the effect, which was certainly the case on Monday. The Adagio movement, equally exposed, conveyed an eloquent simplicity. The folk-like character of the Minuet and Finale that followed was meshed with classical elegance and restraint.
The center of the program was Shostakovich’s Quartet No. 10 (Op. 118), composed in 1964. As in much of this composer’s output, there is a recurring element of fear and anger, a subtle aural protest against the Soviet artistic repression of that time. The piece presents all sorts of technical and interpretive demands, which the Emerson met to the fullest degree. The opening movement stated the main musical elements and set the emotional tone. The Allegretto Furioso that follows was overtly fierce, stirring and exhilarating in Monday’s highly charged rendition. Most moving was the poignant passacaglia movement: variations on a reiterated phrase, here first stated by the cello, later taken up in a quite gorgeous extended passage for the viola. The mood changes briefly at the start of the finale, and the players depicted some moments of respite before the work goes back to its quiet ending of resignation or despair.
Brahms Quartet No. 2 (Op. 51, No. 2) is an expansive, heart-on-the-sleeve, outpouring of the romantic artist’s inner turbulence. Its opaque textures and thickly clumped lower sonorities are a challenge to any performing group. The Emerson Quartet played with its accustomed skill but did not quite manage to clarify the work’s murky complexities, nor lighten up the atmosphere of self-indulgent gloom. Here, listening to each other was of prime importance, and a particularly gratifying element was the give and take among the players of momentary individual prominence.
Violinist Setzer defined admirably the triplet figures that pepper common-time meter of the slow movement, while the group ethos of accord was an asset in differentiating the third movement’s intentionally old-fashioned minuet patterns with the alternating scherzo-like interspersions. Still, it was not quite enough to elucidate the work’s sometime impenetrable densities.
Robert Croan is a Post-Gazette senior editor.
First Published: October 7, 2015, 4:00 a.m.