Pittsfield — The Emerson String Quartet will perform a program of Haydn, Ravel, and Beethoven at South Mountain Concert Hall on Sunday, September 18 at 3 p.m.
Formed at New York’s Juilliard School in 1976, the Emerson String Quartet has released more than 30 recordings and won the Avery Fisher Prize, three Gramophone awards, Musical America’s “Ensemble of the Year” award, and nine GRAMMYs. The group has made concert appearances on most of the world’s continents (but not Antarctica, which is short on suitable concert venues).
All of the Emersons are professional educators. Violinist Philip Setzer and violist Lawrence Dutton are Distinguished Professors at Stony Brook University, where they teach full time. Part-time faculty members Eugene Drucker and Paul Watkins are Honorary Distinguished Professors at the same school.
This fact is especially interesting to South Mountain patrons, because the Calidore Quartet, which performed at South Mountain on September 11, did a three-year residency at Stony Brook, and one of their violinists, Ryan Meehan, had something to say about it in a Strings Magazine interview:
“We’ve all grown up listening to the Emerson recordings our whole lives. As teachers, they know how to allow you to retain your own voice and style and yet guide you in learning the rep. And because they are still performing, they have a perspective that other mentors lack who are not performing today.”
I asked Emerson violinist Eugene Drucker to say something about the quartet’s program for Sunday, and he responded generously. The three pieces he refers to are Haydn’s String Quartet in G Major, Op. 33, No. 5, Ravel’s String Quartet in F Major, and Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 8 in E Minor, Op. 59, No. 2.
“The three pieces represent three distinct styles and agendas, so to speak, in the goals that the composers set for themselves. Haydn opens the quartet by playing around with our expectations of how phrases and entire movements should begin and end, with a quiet cadential figure that leads to the keynote of G.
“The Largo, in the parallel key of G Minor, is mostly a dramatic, declamatory solo for the first violin with tightly interwoven responses from the other three instruments.
“The Scherzo is a demonstration of Haydn’s trademark wit, with unexpected shifts of metric emphasis and sudden silences. And the finale gives the composer a chance to demonstrate his mastery of variation technique.
“The Ravel Quartet is a nuanced exploration of color, atmosphere and texture, worlds away from Haydn and Beethoven but still governed by a Classical sense of structure in each movement.
“The opening of Beethoven’s opus 59 number 2 is confrontational, concentrating on motivic development and making frequent use of silences for dramatic (rather than humorous) effect.
“The slow movement is a starry-eyed evocation of the medieval concept of the music of the spheres. The melancholy third movement, not quite a scherzo, has a contrasting middle section in the parallel major key, in which Beethoven makes brilliant use of a Russian folk song at the request of the man who commissioned the three works in this opus, Count Rasumovsky, the Russian ambassador to Vienna.
“The rhythmically propulsive finale begins in what seems like C Major but is continually pulled back into the darker home key of this work, E Minor.
“An emphatic restatement of the main theme toward the end is followed by a precipitous coda that brings the entire work to a thrilling conclusion.
“We’ll appear at South Mountain once more in September 2023. Lou Steigler has been very loyal to us over the years, and we appreciate it!”
See the Emerson String Quartet at South Mountain Concerts, September 18, at 3 p.m. Ticket information here.
