Emerson Quartet is drowned out by a helicopter

Emerson Quartet is drowned out by a helicopter

News

norman lebrecht

June 30, 2021

From our friends at New York Classical Review:

The Naumburg Bandshell in Central Park is one of the primary outdoor places to enjoy classical music in New York right now. Recently restored this fine venue is currently one of the few classical with a regular, in-person concert schedule.

Tuesday night, that schedule brought the mixed and combined forces of the Emerson and Ulysses String Quartets. The musicians, playing Strauss, Bruckner, Shostakovich, and the Mendelssohn Octet battled the elements with some verve, and succeeded in the end, though it was close call….

Bruckner’s Quintet has more oomph, but isolating the third Adagio movement from the rest gave the performance a hazy presence. Bruckner is a large-scale thinker, and as deep as his slow movements are, they are best when prepared by previous sections. The players—Brookes joined violinists Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer and the rest of the Emersons—circled the edges of the piece for awhile, then became clearly more involved in the middle section, bringing in the audience. But the closing pages were marred by the slow pass of a helicopter, seeming deliberate about ruining the experience. After the final note, Setzer gestured to the sky with his bow, in frustration…

Read on here.

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