Ruth Leon…A personal farewell to the Emerson Quartet

Last week at the Aspen Music Festival I heard many concerts and many standout musicians – Gil Shaham, Robert McDuffie, Yefim Bronfman among them – and one opera. That’s what music festivals are for, after all. They were all splendid.

But one concert was more special than the others because it was the last performance by the internationally lauded Emerson String Quartet. It was performed in Aspen’s Harris Hall, which they had inaugurated in 1993. I was there. But the Emersons’ history goes back further than that.

40 years ago, four young men had a radical idea. They were young, did I already say that? Very  young. The original members of the Emerson String Quartet, Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer, had met at Juilliard in 1975, both violinists’ sons. They were in their early 20s and realised that they were blessed with similar, almost identical ideas about music. What was good, what wasn’t, and what they wanted their fledgling partnership to be.

They started in the quartet repertoire by alternating First and Second Violin parts, a practice that is usually abandoned once student days are over but these two loved the variety and continue the practice to this day, in the only quartet I know that does. They alternated in their final concert too.

A couple of false starts at the beginning quickly gave way to the perfect combination when they were joined by Lawrence Dutton on viola and David Finckel on cello. And, suddenly, just like that, they were the Emerson String Quartet, universally known as “The Emersons”, choosing the name because they liked the social ideas of the American idealist and thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Dutton had been a student at Aspen in 1975/76 and, ever since he joined the quartet he has revelled in the Emersons annual appearances in the Festival. “I fell in love with Aspen right from the start. We made so many friends, played with such great musicians, had so much fun climbing mountains, teaching, learning from everybody.  I met my wife in Aspen (violinist Elizabeth Lim-Dutton), and we’ve been together now for 36 years. It’s such a special place, unlike any other. It’s only right that we’re now coming back for our last season.”

Back to that radical idea 40 years ago. It may not seem so radical today – bold, yes, not insane – but in March 1981 it seemed crazy. They decided to play all six Bartok quartets in one long concert as an homage to Bartok’s centenary, a marathon which had never been attempted before. “Everyone thought it wouldn’t work,” recalls Setzer, “but it became one of those magical evenings when people got more and more into it.”

The concert at Alice Tully Hall was a triumph, discussed and emulated throughout the chamber music world, even by people who weren’t there.
The Emersons followed up with cycles of Beethoven and Shostakovich and became, at the beginning of the digital era, the preferred quartet of Deutsche Grammophon for whom they have recorded virtually the whole of the quartet repertoire, including a number of original compositions composed for them. They continue to perform the Bartok Quartets although they admit that continuing to perform them in one big push is punishing, “We have to prepare very carefully, almost like athletes. It requires not only stamina, but being able to keep all those pieces in top shape in our fingers at one time.”

Awards poured in and the extraordinary musical and personal empathy they display in performance must sometimes have been tested by their success. It is very difficult for a solo musician – travelling constantly, playing in a different city every night, learning new music, rehearsing all day, performing in unfamiliar halls, staying in hotels for weeks on end, away from family and friends, missing familiar food and the comforts of home – so imagine those endless challenges multiplied by four. It’s a miracle that the Emersons still enjoy each other’s company and love playing together.

In 2012, David Finckel left the quartet to play music in other forms, usually with his wife, the pianist Wu Han, a seismic event which could easily have presaged the breakup of such a tightknit group. Instead, they were joined by Welsh-born cellist Paul Watkins, decades younger, who fitted into the quartet seamlessly and brought new and innovative ideas which were welcomed by the others. “We knew immediately that Paul was one of the finest musicians we had ever played with,” says Larry Dutton.

Those of us who have been coming to Aspen nearly as long as The Emersons have so many memories of individual concerts which astounded us and fun events we enjoyed together. Writer and critic Harvey Steiman spotlights his particular favourites, “Already a fixture in Aspen, the Emerson Quartet played the entire set of 15 Shostakovich string quartets over eight seasons from 1999 to 2007. Deutsche Grammophon was there to record them right there in Harris Hall. The live performances are etched in my memory as textbook examples of precision and emotional detail, some of the most jaw-dropping and evocative chamber music I’ve ever been present to enjoy. The full-set album of this miracle is something I treasure.” Me too, to coin a phrase.

Now it’s nearly all over. The Emersons, now grey-haired, are retiring at the end of this year and it is difficult to imagine the chamber music world without them although Dutton points out that they sit at the centre of their era, having grown out of the Juilliard and Budapest Quartets, and progenitors of the younger, newer quartets who are following them.

I met the Emersons when they first played at the Aspen Music Festival and became an instant groupie which I have remained to this day. Musically they were a revelation, socially they were a riot. We ate, partied and laughed together for nearly 40 years.
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It can’t be over, can it?