Editor’s note: This is an updated version of the article that was published earlier today.
LENOX — Since its Tanglewood debut in 1981, the Emerson String Quartet has performed at the Boston Symphony’s summer home 24 times. And on Wednesday, June 28, the group will make its very last appearance there. The Emerson will disband in October after its final performance, which documentarian Tristan Cook will film at Lincoln Center in New York City. The Emerson’s final Berkshire performance will take place at South Mountain Concerts on Sunday, September 10. Joining the Emersons in Ozawa Hall on the 28th will be another Tanglewood regular, pianist Emanuel Ax, who will join the Quartet for a performance of Dvorak’s beloved Piano Quintet, opus 81.
The Emerson’s program for Wednesday has something for every taste: a 1678 piece from Henry Purcell that predates works by the father of the string quartet by almost a century; Shostakovich’s melancholic flirtation with serialism — his String Quartet No. 12; Dvořák’s Piano Quintet in A, Op. 81; and a new piece, a BSO co-commission by Sarah Kirkland Snider, “Drink the Wild Ayre,” through which the quartet demonstrates its longstanding enthusiasm for strangely challenging contemporary string quartet literature, as well as the members’ continuing willingness to work their tails off after 46 years of preparing new material.
I spoke with violinist and founding Emerson member Eugene Drucker last week to hear what he had to say about the group’s last Tanglwood appearance. In the interview below, Mr. Drucker speaks candidly about his time as a 16-year-old prodigy studying at the Tanglewood Music Center, his bittersweet feelings about the Emerson’s retirement, and how he is still working to perfect his own sound. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Wednesday’s concert will be the quartet’s very last appearance at Tanglewood. How do you feel about that?
We feel nostalgic about it. It’s a great place to play, and I may have mentioned to you in one of our previous interviews that Tanglewood is one of my strong connections to the Berkshires, because I was a student there ages ago. I spent two summers there when I was 16 and 18, and it opened my eyes and ears to music in so many ways. I had a lot of wonderful chamber music coachings, my first time working on a late Beethoven quartet, and orchestral literature also.
And I got to hear, each summer, seven or eight weekends of Boston Symphony Orchestra concerts. So it was really a thrilling experience for me as a very young, aspiring violinist and then, subsequently, as a professional coming back to Tanglewood. I think the first time was in 1981, then we came again in 1983 and a few times the rest of that decade, and then almost regularly — I would say just about every summer starting from perhaps the mid-1990s until when the pandemic struck.
So we’ve built up, I guess, a loyal following — a consistent audience — and Tanglewood has been one of the main stops in our itinerary almost every summer throughout a large part of our careers. So, or course, we’ve got a lot of positive feelings about the venue, especially Ozawa Hall, where we started playing just after it was built. Before that, we had played some concerts in the theater-concert hall, which is where I played almost everything as a student back in 1968 and 1970.
So it will be bittersweet. I mean, we made the decision to disband. It’s gonna be four months from now — our final concerts at Lincoln Center in New York. I think it was probably the right decision at the right time for us, but that doesn’t mean that it’s unmixed as far as the emotional aspect is concerned. And a number of places have been very important to us in our career and sometimes even on a personal level, because we’ve made friends in many cities and festivals in the U.S. and Europe. We’ve already played our final concerts in so many places, so that — again, it’s not tragic. It’s a decision that we made. It’s not something that was forced upon us, except maybe by the inevitable march of time. But apart from that, you know, we’ve been playing together — the three older members of the quartet have been playing together now for 46 years. And by the time we stop in late October it will have been 47 years — at least for Phil and me — and Larry joined us exactly 46 years ago.
I think everything in life, everything that’s good, has it’s own natural duration. You choose a time — if you’re lucky enough to choose the time — when perhaps one should think of stopping and looking toward new possibilities before it’s too late to look for new possibilities for what to do. Paul is somewhat younger, so he has many years of a career to look ahead to.
How do members of the group play differently from the way they played 46 years ago?
It’s hard to be objective about what we do, but of course things have changed. It’s not so much that we wanted to change, but as one grows older, one hopes to acquire maturity. It doesn’t always work that way, but as that natural aging and maturation process has occurred, I think there have been changes in our playing: Maybe some of our tempo choices have mellowed a little bit compared to the 1990s or so, and also having a change of personnel ten years ago created certain changes as well.
So our sound changed when Paul Watkins joined the group. He and David Finckel are both marvelous cellists, and David’s sound on the cello — if I had to sum it up in a few words, or one word — is more of a tenor cello sound, where Paul’s sound is more of a baritone or bass-baritone sound. So that provided a different kind of foundation for the quartet’s sound.
And the rest of us, over the years, have developed our sounds also. I mean, I’m always working on sound — I’m still working on it now. And so I hope that the sound has deepened in some way or other over the years. At least, that’s what we’re aiming for. And interpretively… Well, we keep coming back to many of the same pieces, sometimes after having let them lie fallow for a few years. And then we revisit them. So there’s an ongoing process of living with these great works, letting them go for a couple of seasons, getting reacquainted with them and practicing them individually all over again, and finally coming together to rehearse them at least once. If they are very familiar pieces, we might have just one rehearsal before performing them again. But then the repeated performances in the course of any season offer opportunities to grow again with the music — I hope.
There’s also a difference between recording and live performance. So if our recordings from decades past are the benchmarks against which I measure the way we do things now, it’s not a totally fair comparison, because even at the time, we might have performed those pieces a little differently from the way we recorded them. We’ve noticed that with close miking there’s a feeling that the tempos need to be more brisk, perhaps, than a performance situation, where instead of having a mic seventeen inches away, you’re trying to project the music to people who are many feet away and trying to make it clear to them. So you need to take a little more time to do that, depending on the acoustics.
In the studio, you usually don’t have a super-live room muddying things up.
That’s right. Or even if the room IS live, if you’re miked closely, then some of the resonance of the room might be neutralized to some extent.
How has the business of chamber music changed since the Emerson started?
The recording industry has certainly changed. We began to have success as a recording ensemble almost a decade after we had started as a performing entity and at least a few years after we had achieved some respect and success as a concertizing quartet. And it happened to coincide with the advent of the compact disc, a few years after the first CD. I think what that did to the recording industry, what that meant was, that a lot of people were replacing their home LP collections. They were making the transition from LPs to CDs. And the recording companies were willing to invest a lot of money in rerecording large swaths of their repertoire. And of course a lot of this, financially, was probably enabled by the pop recording industry, too.
But our experience of it as classical artists was that we were given almost carte blanche by Deutsche Grammophon. Maybe not exactly carte blanche, but given a lot of free rein, with their approval, to record a lot of the quartet repertoire. We were releasing more than one recording per year, and sometimes they were multi-CD releases — like the six Mozart quartets dedicated to Haydn — and around the same time we were recording a Prokofiev album, and that was a single CD. Also around that time, we were recording the Barber quartet and the two Ives quartets.
So a lot was going on sometimes within the same season. And then we did the complete Beethoven cycle, which is seven CDs, in the mid-90s. So we were privileged to have those opportunities. And there was a feeling that this could just go on and on.
But then things changed, because physical product was less emphasized once you got into the 2000s. Then you had things like Apple iTunes — different platforms by which younger people, especially, were purchasing the music they wanted to listen to. And it often involved single tracks. So there was a shift away from not only physical product but from multi-CD releases. Those were not encouraged anymore after a certain time. So we could really feel the difference.
Also, the way we had promoted our recordings — we did many in-store performances at the request of the recording companies. We played at Tower Records, Borders, bookstores… Well, those places sort of went out of existence, because physical product just wasn’t as popular anymore as it had been. So that’s one very noticeable change.
As far as concerts are concerned, I don’t know if there has been a corresponding change. I don’t think so, and I hope not. In other words, there’s still demand for concerts. There’s been a big proliferation of quartets. There are many fine young quartets out there, and the Internet has become a large part of the way they market themselves. And some of these younger groups are very tech savvy: They know how to present themselves in a way that will appeal to younger audiences. And that’s good. I mean, one has to be adaptable.
Have you seen a change in the public’s interest in music from living composers?
I’m not sure there has been a change. There was certainly interest in our early decade or two as the Emerson Quartet, but I think that the music itself has changed, and perhaps it has become more accessible to audiences in general. So, in that sense, yes, maybe there’s greater interest on the part of audiences in some of the contemporary music that’s being produced now, as opposed to forty years ago. The harmonic and melodic language are less forbidding to a general audience.
So new music is becoming more accessible?
Yes. The harmonic language will include more references to tonality or modality. There’s definitely been a move away from serial kind of structuring of music, and so the surface of the music may seem to be more inviting or more familiar to audiences at large. I don’t make value judgements about this. I’m just commenting on what I’ve noticed. Also, I think that some of the younger composers are now doing some crossover: They’re adapting elements from popular music. And music from other cultures, perhaps, will become more noticeable in classical contemporary music that’s being produced nowadays.
That brings us to Sarah Kirkland Snider, the composer of “Drink the Wild Ayre,” one of the pieces you’ll perform on Wednesday.
That is an accessible work, I believe, for audiences. It’s not without its difficulties, for us, at least, because for large parts of it the beats consist of five sixteenth notes rather than the four that we’re accustomed to playing. That might mean a slight adjustment for the audience, but I think it’s more of an issue for us, the performers, in order to play it with rhythmic security. But the harmonic language is tonal or modal — sort of oscillating between those two. And what dissonance there is in the work comes from the fact that she’ll have two or more instruments based on different notes of the scale playing their own material — each instrument’s material does not seem very angular or dissonant in itself, but when you put them together there is a certain amount of clash. But not in a way that would be hard on the ears for audiences, I think.
There are some intonation challenges as well as the rhythmic challenges for us. That’s something that we have to keep working on. Tonight we’re playing it here [Detroit], so I think we’ve played it three times so far. And the last time was in mid-May, so that’s what we were rehearsing just now. We had just under an hour to rehearse it.
And we’re going to work on it again with her [Snider] on Wednesday afternoon before the concert. She has made some changes in it, and I think that we’re just working in the third version of certain sections and passages. So for me that has meant printing out at least one page of the first violin part and pasting it into the score. We have to rehearse it, because some of the material that used to be in another instrument is now in my part, for example. I think this latest version of one of the tricky sections is working very well now that we’re getting used to it.
The other thing I want to say about the piece is that it has a very pleasing narrative arc, so to speak. It starts quietly and mysteriously, and then there are moments where it build up to quite a pitch of intensity. And sometimes she marks certain places in the score “ecstatic.” And then, toward the end, it tapers off and disappears to a very quiet place again. So, all in all, I think it’s going to be a satisfying experience for the audience.
I know you won’t like my last question, but I’m going to ask it anyway: Of all the string quartets you have known, which one would you want to live with on a desert island?
Well… My answer to that is, I’m very fortunate to love many, many pieces in our repertoire. But if I were forced to make a choice, I think it would be Beethoven’s Opus 130, with the Cavatina and then the Grosse fuge. The extremes of emotion and soundscape in that piece are just extraordinary. And we’ll be playing that piece in our final concerts.
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Hear the Emerson String Quartet with Emanuel Ax at Tanglewood’s Ozawa hall Wednesday, June 28 at 8 p.m. Purchase tickets here.
