A long, last look at the departing Emerson Quartet

Our string quartet diarist Anthea Kreston reports from Eugene, Oregon:

In some ways, it was like taking a deep look into my own mortality. Or, I suppose, the arc of life. I hadn’t planned on attending, because my older daughter had a part in the local musical, which, as a classical music parent, is hard to wrap my brain around, in a non-judgmental way. A child of mine being passionate about musicals. All that song and dance, and crooning, and gender stereotypes and delayed vibrato. But, there you have it, she is more interested in belting one out than practicing her Haydn C Major Cello Concerto.

So, when I got a text, 1.5 hours before curtain, that there was a last-minute pair of tickets for the Emerson String Quartet, a mere hour from my home, I jumped in the car, bringing with me my younger daughter (my Kabalevsky Violin Concerto-playing 11 year old), and grabbing four small gifts from our local co-op grocery to give them after the show.

As we approached the University of Oregon, in the charming college town of Eugene, Oregon, concertgoers of all stripe were already clustering around the entrance to Beall Hall, a historic Jewel Box theater encased in the dated 80’s brick addition which houses the school of music, Oregon’s most cherished music institution. As is usual fare for the Oregon crowd, elderly, well-dressed patrons stand next to young, tattooed and green-haired students, as well as a variety of what appears to be a living museum of hippies of all ages.

The hall was packed, and as Mirabai and I slid into our center seats in the balcony, I was happy to see some texts from my college and high school students pop up on my phone. We all planned to meet at the side stage door, in the case that I could introduce them to the quartet after the show.

My formal years of quartet training were with the Emerson, as my string quartet (a French/Canadian group that I had joined in my early 20’s after graduating from Curtis) was fortunate to be in residence with them for two years at the University of Hartford. Weekly coachings with the quartet members, as well as private lessons (I studied with Phil Setzer) and summer opportunities gave my quartet a firm foot forward, and the lessons I learned from the Emerson, about life, music, and how to survive the grueling toll of travel and never-ending complexities of a 4-way marriage, have guided my life ever since.

As I saw the Emerson enter the stage, to thunderous applause, my throat immediately constricted. Here they were, still vigorous in their own ways, but, for the first time I could see the visible signs of aging. A bit slower, a bit stooped even, and perhaps a little weary. As they approach their final 100 days of being the Emerson String Quartet, they could have played it safe. They could have picked repertoire that would play itself. But no, in the typical Emerson fashion they played an invigorating program with a newly commissioned work by an American composer (Sarah Kirkland Snider), Bartok 2 and Beethoven 131.

There are ways to cheat in Bartok. He asks for impossible fingerings in unison passages – fingerings that are guaranteed to be flawed. Many quartets find a way around these moments, like having extreme balance (very loud cello, layering less in the viola and nearly inaudible in the first violin). Or changing the fingerings, some people playing in lower positions and some in higher. But not the Emerson. Every moment of that Bartok 2 and Beethoven 131, every single chance to say something individually or collectively, something was said. A timing, a subtle slide, an accelerando when the speed was already nearing crazy. Sure, it wasn’t as clean or in tune as it was before, but it’s the principal of it. The derring-do and the tenderness and the balance of honoring yourself and the composer. The vibrato. Oh my god the vibrato. So personal, so sentimental, so searching and demanding.

And, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Emerson Quartet’s influence on their contemporaries and the generations after, through performance, recording, programming (remember their Carnegie Hall debut with the 6 Bartok quartets?), and teaching will only become greater as time passes.

As I gathered my group of students around me, moving from Emerson to Emerson, one of my students, a high-schooler who is on the autism spectrum, turned to me and said: “Professor Kreston – I see what is happening now. I can see you, talking to your old teachers, and I can hear their vibrato in your playing, and I know that what they taught you, you have taught us, and if you listen to us play, you can hear them playing through us.”

It was at that moment that I knew why it was so important for me to be there, with my child, with my students, and with my teachers. To be a rung on a ladder with no beginning and no end.
 

photo: Petr Kadlec