Tanglewood, Lenox, MA
July 10, 2014
by Michael J. Moran
The Emerson String Quartet is one of the most durable
ensembles on today’s classical music scene. Three of its founders in 1976 are
still members, and their only personnel change occurred in 2013, when cellist
Paul Watkins succeeded original cellist David Finckel.
The “new” Emersons made an impressive Tanglewood debut last
summer, and their return visit to Ozawa Hall this year featured an extended
program of Shostakovich’s last five string quartets. The original Emersons
recorded all fifteen of the composer’s quartets to wide acclaim in 2006, and in
recent years the ensemble has made a specialty of presenting the last five
together, which, like Beethoven’s late quartets, are more inward and even
mystical than their predecessors.
These quartets were all written between 1966 and 1974, a
year before Shostakovich died. Though much of their music is loose in form and
quiet in tone, the fifteenth stands apart as the composer’s longest, most
rarefied and startling quartet. Its six movements are all marked “Adagio” and
played without pause, ending the concert on an eerie note that was also
exhilarating in its focus and intensity.
It’s hard to imagine a more riveting performance of this
demanding music. From the echoes of Russian folksong in the eleventh quartet,
the grief and anger of the twelfth, the knocking sound of the bows’ wood
striking their instruments in the thirteenth, the romantic mood of the
fourteenth, through the dark, death-haunted fifteenth, the musicians never
wavered in their technical precision and interpretive depth.
Their versatility was reinforced as violinists Eugene
Drucker and Philip Setzer swapped first chair duties and cellist Watkins and
violist Lawrence Dutton outdid each other in the variety of tonal shadings they
coaxed from their respective strings.
With two intermissions (after the twelfth and fourteenth
quartets), the three-hour program was an immersive experience for performers
and listeners alike. Few members of the rapt audience left at either
intermission, and those who completed this profound journey with the Emersons
gave them multiple and well-earned standing ovations after the hushed close of
the fifteenth quartet had faded into the night.
