Music Reviews : Emerson String Quartet at Schoenberg Hall

The Emerson String Quartet no longer has an audience. It has a following, as witness the numerous music lovers turned away, ticketless, at UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall on Sunday.

The Emersons--violinists Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer, violist Lawrence Dutton, cellist David Finckel--justified enthusiasm from the outset, with their dark, driving, flawlessly balanced projection of Mozart’s tremendous Adagio and Fugue in C minor. Intensity did not flag with a surprisingly apt follow-up: the brief 1946 Elegy by Elliott Carter, quite likely the only work by that composer that can bear the adjective pretty.

A pre-intermission climax was achieved with as harrowing and perfectly realized an account of Bartok’s First Quartet as this listener can recall.

If subsequently there was a letdown, blame it partially on the traditional Emerson switch, i.e. Setzer, who had played second to that point, changing places with Drucker, the pre-intermission first violinist.

Setzer’s somewhat wiry tone and, on this occasion, minor intonational lapses contributed to an unfocused interpretation of Beethoven’s Second “Rasumovsky” Quartet marked by a striving for ever greater drama and sonority--with their inherently big, gleaming ensemble tone the Emerson need never force--and some scrambling, particularly in the two middle movements.