Emerson String Quartet:
Farewell Performance,
Alice Tully Hall, New York,
October 21, 2023.
Danish String Quartet,
Richardson Auditorium, Princeton,
November 2, 2023.
Let me start by making a case for the form itself.
The term is both musical and human, both a score for four musicians and a label for the four people who play it. I can’t think of another musical form that is identified with its performers in this way. An orchestra plays symphonies or concertos; a duo plays duets or sonatas; a soloist can play any number of things. Even a trio, depending on its make-up, might play string trios, piano-and-string trios, clarinet-piano-and-string trios…but the group itself is still called just a trio, whatever kind of music it specializes in. Only a string quartet plays string quartets.
The music written for this combination of two violins, a viola, and a cello was codified, and perhaps even originated, by Joseph Haydn. Since he basically invented the form—and in a massive way, writing sixty-eight string quartets in the course of his life—I doubt the four-member assemblage was a common performance structure in his time. Probably two eighteenth-century violinists had to get together, ad hoc, with an eighteenth-century violist and an eighteenth-century cellist every time a new Haydn quartet was to be played. Most of this playing, in any case, occurred in royal courts and private houses rather than on a concert stage—that is, what we still call chamber music really took place in a chamber in those days. While this may seem exclusive in certain contexts, it can also be quite freeing in others. During Dmitri Shostakovich’s time, for instance, when Stalin was scrutinizing his every symphony for signs of degenerate resistance, the composer could still hear his string quartets played in the privacy of his own apartment, even during periods when his music had been publicly banned.
I’ll stick with Shostakovich for a minute, since his fifteen quartets are particularly dear to me. All of them, except for the first and the last, were written for and first performed by a single group of four musicians who called themselves the Beethoven Quartet. Their roster changed over the course of time, as some members died or retired and were replaced by their younger students, but the Beethovens’ sound remained essentially the same in the three decades between the second Shostakovich quartet (1944) and the fourteenth (1973). These four players were his friends and collaborators as well as the vehicles for his most personal music. They knew how he wanted things to sound, and he wrote to their specific skills and characters; he even dedicated four of his late quartets to them individually, singling out each musician in turn.
Continuity and longevity can be an important part of what a string quartet group offers us as audience members, too. The lengthier the acquaintance, the more we are able to get to know and appreciate the musical personalities of the four players, together and apart. There have been a few lightning-fast allegiances to string quartets in my past (to the Vertigo Quartet, for instance, an endearingly youthful collective which lasted only a few short years after its members graduated from the Curtis Institute), but for the most part I have cultivated long-term relationships. And among these, for me as for so many others, was my relationship with the Emerson String Quartet.
I have my own special attachment to the Emersons, in large part because the group’s two violinists, Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer, helped me enormously when I was writing a book about Shostakovich’s string quartets. But my debt to the group goes back even further than that. It was the Emersons’ own performance of the entire Shostakovich quartet cycle, during the 2006 centennial of the composer’s birth, that gave me the idea of writing the book in the first place. I used their multi-volume Shostakovich recording as the baseline from which to advance my own listening adventures, branching out into historic recordings by the Beethovens and the Borodins along with contemporary ones by the Pacifica Quartet, the Alexander Quartet, and the Jerusalem Quartet. And when I later sought out musicians who had performed the quartets and could tell me things I would never have known as a mere listener, Phil and Gene were among the most informative in my large group of helpers.
These two violinists were in at the start of the Emerson String Quartet nearly a half-century ago, when it was merely an ambitious dream in the minds of four Juilliard students. After a year, the group exchanged its original violist for Lawrence Dutton, and then, a couple of years later, they acquired the cellist David Finckel. It was in this form that the Emerson String Quartet persisted for most of the decades since then, though in 2013 Finckel retired from the group to pursue his other musical activities and was replaced by the excellent Paul Watkins.
The Emersons were always a pleasure to hear. They became a stalwart of the New York music scene, appearing with particular frequency on the programs of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (an organization of which David Finckel is now the co-director). I listened to them often, but I didn’t make unusual efforts to attend their concerts, especially if they conflicted with those of other performers whose work I valued. I suppose my thinking ran: a) I know what to expect from an Emerson concert—that is, good if not surprising music; and b) they will always be here.
About both of these things I turned out to be mistaken. Since they announced their retirement a year or so ago, the Emersons’ concerts have deepened in a way I never could have predicted. In their semi-farewell concert last spring, which ranged from Purcell to Haydn to Mozart to middle-period Beethoven, they exhibited an intensity and an emotional depth that felt new to me. I left their April concert at Alice Tully Hall profoundly moved, as did many in that completely full audience. Other critics have mentioned a loss of force or strength in their recent playing, as if old age had brought frailty, but I did not interpret the softly played notes in that way. On the contrary: in these, their final public appearances, they proved themselves willing to go out on a limb musically, to play toward feeling rather than note-perfect rigor, and to allow the human element to enter fully into what they were performing. In my eyes, these were all improvements, not losses at all.
And then, on October 21 and 22, once again under the auspices of CMS, the Emerson String Quartet truly did give its farewell performances. I imagine the Sunday afternoon concert was even more emotionally fraught than the one I attended, but since I couldn’t get tickets for that, I gladly went on the Saturday night. As before, the house was packed with Emerson fans, colleagues, students, and even relatives. (At the interval I exchanged a few words with a man carrying a small baby, who turned out to be Phil Setzer’s son-in-law holding his new granddaughter.) And as before, the musical choices were superb and well-matched. But this time those selections reached even deeper into the core of romantic feeling, the heartland of chamber music for strings. The first half of the program consisted entirely of Beethoven’s Opus 130, with Opus 133, the Grosse Fugue, as its ending; and the second half was also just one piece: Schubert’s Quintet in C major for two violins, two cellos, and a viola.
The Beethoven was sublime—not in the sense of being beatific or ethereal, but in its willingness to face up to the despair and harshness that provide the necessary counterpoint to life’s ephemeral beauty. Eugene Drucker took the first violin role for this one, and his quiet, grave, delicate phrases, especially in the heart-rending Cavatina, set the tone for the rest of the players. When they reached the maniacal Grosse Fugue, where the offset, overlapping patterns of a normal fugue get pushed nearly into incoherence, they lent themselves completely to the work’s semblance of wild disarray, sometimes appearing to branch out into four separate compositions. And then, suddenly, they regrouped as one for the stirringly intense ending. All late Beethoven pieces try as hard as possible not to end—you can hear it from the Fifth Symphony onward—but none so wrenchingly as Opus 133, which practically moans with the effort to pick itself up and go on, again and yet again. We in the audience felt it too: the piercing sense that we were hearing these notes from these hands for the very last time, even while we were wishing it could go on forever. And then came that final rising sequence of lovely, autumnal, transcendent chords, and it was over.
If I had been programming the evening, I probably would have put the Beethoven after the interval. But I would have been wrong. Because what happened in the concert’s second half was that the other meaning of “farewell”—not goodbye, but “fare well,” as in go well, be well, even if we are apart—came to the fore. Philip Setzer took over the first-violin position, in the Emersons’ traditional role-swapping manner (a tradition that they virtually invented, because it was barely done when they started), and the quartet was joined by David Finckel, the masterful cellist who had left the group ten years earlier. It was as if they were telling us that the past is not really gone, but can actually be revived again with all the old connections still alive and solid.
The Schubert Quintet in C major is thought by many to be a perfect piece of music, and while I sometimes find its plangencies a bit too sweet (compared, say, to the harder, darker Schubert of Winterreise and Schwanengesang), it was indeed the perfect choice for this closing moment. Finckel provided the rhythm section, his frequent pizzicato marking the passage of time as the other four focused mostly on the melodies—though even the second cello, in this piece, comes in for a fair share of soaring harmonies. There was strength in the feeling of unison, but also a certain fragility, as if all this pleasure existed only by common agreement and could be wiped out in a flash if anyone failed to hold up his end. That was deeply touching. And so was the final curtain call (the fourth, by my count), when the two cellists hugged each other, and then David Finckel stepped aside and gestured toward the other musicians, as if to say: Here they are, the four members of the Emerson String Quartet. Now bid them farewell.
Endings are notoriously affecting, but beginnings and middles warrant close attention, too. I’ve been following the Danish String Quartet for over ten years now, ever since they had their West Coast debut at Music@Menlo in the summer of 2013. Those four tousle-haired, relaxed, adorable guys seemed very young then, and yet they were already wise beyond their years. Even at that early stage, they stunned their premiere audience, not only with their electrifying skill and precision, but with the way they understood the essential point of music: that it exists to move us. And that, over the years, has been their defining feature for me. Even as they’ve lost none of the joy and enthusiasm of their youthful concerts, they’ve matured into a group that, with seeming effortlessness, conveys the deepest and most thrilling emotions of whatever piece they happen to be playing.
Their one-night performance at Princeton University this past November was no exception. Held in the charmingly intimate Richardson Auditorium—a venue they explicitly praised in their onstage comments—the concert consisted of the Purcell Chacony arranged by Benjamin Britten, Haydn’s rarely performed Opus 20, No. 3, Shostakovich’s Seventh Quartet, and a series of Nordic folk tunes adapted by the Danes themselves. (I say “Danes,” but they actually include one Norwegian. The current quartet’s three original members—Frederik Øland and Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen on violin, Asbjørn Nørgaard on viola—founded the DSQ in Copenhagen in 2002, when they were all teenagers; Fredrik Sjölin, the Norwegian cellist, joined them six years later.) As they always do, Sørensen and Øland took turns in the first-violin position, having fully adopted the method that the Emersons pioneered. And as they always do, the members of the quartet spoke to us companionably from the stage, introducing or commenting on the pieces they were playing even as they warmly thanked us for gathering together to hear them.
Classical purists might have some quibbles with their approach, which consists of mingling made-for-quartet works (Haydn, Shostakovich) with the ingeniously adapted (the Purcell and, even more daringly, the folk tunes). But for me this is one of their virtues. They clearly feel, and want to convey, that music is music wherever it stems from, and that the anonymous tune deserves to be played with as much care and vigor as the brainchild of an acknowledged master.
It’s not that they blur the distinctions, however. In the November concert, the Purcell (led by Sørensen) was played with strenuous reticence and markedly little vibrato, while a noticeably different manner was adopted for the sprightly Haydn piece. Eloquently introduced by Øland, but again with Sørensen on the first violin, the Quartet in G minor—one of Haydn’s earliest ventures in the genre—was a revelation of inventiveness, with its moments of stillness, its sudden shifts in pacing, and its strangely inconclusive ending. Then came the heartstopping Shostakovich, this time with Øland at the helm. The Quartet No. 7 in F-sharp minor was played as stunningly as I’ve ever heard it, and I’ve heard it a lot. Dedicated to the composer’s dead wife, this stark, intense, agitated quartet is one of the more unnerving thirteen-minute pieces in the quartet literature, and the DSQ did full justice to it.
A longish intermission separated these works from the second, shorter part of the concert, which consisted of rhythmic, catchy, occasionally plaintive folk tunes from Denmark, Sweden, the Faroe Islands, and elsewhere, arranged by the Danish String Quartet themselves. The entire DSQ is adept at playing Nordic folk music—they have even put out an album of these adaptations, called Wood Works—but in this regard Rune Sørensen is probably the first among equals. It was he who arranged their earliest efforts in this genre, and his interest in the material has become so deep that he’s even founded his own separate folk trio, Dreamers’ Circus.
In that group, Sørensen and his violin are joined by two even younger men: Nikolaj Busk on the accordion, piano, and synthesizers, and Ale Carr, a virtuoso strummer who plays what their program labels “cittern, kannel, violin, and other instruments.” A couple of weeks before the Danish String Quartet was to perform in Princeton, I traveled out there on a Sunday afternoon just to hear Dreamers’ Circus play for an hour. With the relatively small audience assembled around them on the Richardson stage, the three musicians performed standing up—a configuration that allowed them to transmit in a full-bodied way their sheer delight in the music. Some of the tunes reminded me of American bluegrass, others of Irish jigs or Scottish reels; at one point Sørensen even launched into a gorgeously rendered Bach partita, which morphed into something else entirely as the other two joined in. But whatever they were playing, it all felt eminently danceable.
Some of this came across even in the slightly more sedate setting of the Danish String Quartet’s November concert. The two violinists tapped their feet throughout, often in complementary but not identical rhythms; Sjölin, on the cello, swayed his upper body as he drew his bow across the strings; and Nørgaard at times deployed his expressive viola to suggest the human voice behind the songs. By concluding the evening with these pieces, the DSQ left us both energized and relaxed in a way that neither the Shostakovich nor the Haydn, great though they were, could have accomplished. I was hungry for more, as I always am after their concerts, and luckily there will be more, since all signs indicate that if the world itself survives for another quarter-century, so will this magnificent string quartet.
Wendy Lesser is the founding editor of The Threepenny Review. Her latest book is Scandinavian Noir.
