Emerson String Quartet. Koerner Hall, Toronto, Sunday, October 2, 2022. Mendelssohn: String Quartet No. 1 in E flat major MWVR25. Brahms: String Quartet No. 3 in B flat major Op. 67. Dvořák: String Quartet No. 14 in A flat major Op. 105 B. 193.
After more than 45 years of concerts and recordings – mostly for Deutsche Grammophon – the incomparable Emerson String Quartet is calling it quits. During 2022 and 2023 it will be making a farewell tour that will take it across Canada and the United States and to many parts of Europe. The final performance will be given in New York in October 2023.
On the basis of what I heard in Koerner Hall last Sunday, the Emerson Quartet is playing as well as ever. Why are they calling it quits? The reason given publicly is that the members want to spend more time teaching, doing solo work, and playing chamber music with other people. Maybe so but one has to wonder whether these dedicated musicians are just worn out from the constant travel and absences from their families, and from the strain of endless rehearsal and performance. And it is well-documented that many famous quartets have just grown tired of dealing with each other. In some cases they ended up not even speaking to each other. I have no idea how the members of the Emerson Quartet feel about each other but it would not be surprising if after 45 years they might welcome a rest from each other.
I am old enough to have heard in concert groups like the Amadeus Quartet, Quartetto Italiano, the Juilliard Quartet led by Robert Mann, the Alban Berg Quartet and many others. And I have heard the Emerson Quartet from their earliest performances in the late 1970s in places as far-flung as Houston, Dallas, New Orleans, Ottawa, Aspen and Toronto. There is no “greatest ever” string quartet; the music they play is too complex for that. But the Emerson has given us near-perfection technically and profound readings of some of the finest music ever written. Their cycles of quartets by Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Shostakovich, Bartók and others have enriched my understanding of these scores, and I am sure they have done the same for countless other music lovers.
Their Koerner Hall program is one they are playing many times over during their farewell tour. Obviously, these are works dear to their hearts and which give them endless joy to play over and over. If I were choosing three quartets to take with me to a desert island, as much as I love Mendelssohn’s Op. 13, Brahms’ Op. 67 and Dvořák’s Op. 105, they would not be my first choices; I think all three composers wrote better quartets. Be that as it may – and I admit that there is personal taste involved – the Emerson has made superb recordings of all three works and at the Koerner Hall concert they played them in exemplary fashion.
For me, one of the highlights was violist Lawrence Dutton’s outstanding playing in the third movement. I can’t think of another movement in Brahms where the viola is used in such a prominent role. The music is beautiful and Dutton played it as well as it could be played. Brahms himself sometimes spoke of this quartet as a lighthearted piece but the first movement is remarkably original in its use of rhythm and form. The two main themes are even in different metres. Brahms’ harmonic language was generally conservative but he was constantly experimenting with other musical elements.
Dvořák was much more straightforward in his string quartet writing but it seems to me he even surpassed Brahms in his part-writing. In Dvořák’s music one’s ear is often caught by the charm of the melodies but there is frequently even greater mastery in the accompanying parts. The String Quartet Op. 105 is full of such passages and the Emerson made sure we heard clearly what was going on. The work dates from 1895 and was his last string quartet.
The Emerson was rewarded with a standing ovation but I felt that their 45 plus years of music-making deserved much more than that. Something like 15 minutes of sustained ovations would have been more appropriate. We will not see their like again anytime soon.
As an encore the Emerson played one of Dvořák’s Cypresses (a set of love songs for voice and piano) which he later arranged for string quartet. The piece chosen was the elegiac No. 7 “I wander often past yonder house.”
