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By Ken Keuffel Jr.
The Arizona Daily Star
The Emerson String Quartet took its Beethoven crusade to Tucson last night, reviving our faith in the greatest repertory ever written.
The premiere chamber-music ensemble, you'll recall, first made its name with an award-winning recording of Bartók's string quartets.
But recently, it has turned nearly all its attention to Beethoven: A recording of the master's 16 quartets has just been issued, and the Emerson players have offered their often-pithy commentary about the pieces, both on CD and during three recently broadcast St. Paul Sunday programs.
Of course, the only advocacy that really matters is how you play Beethoven night after night. And last night, appearing before a packed house, the Emerson delivered with all their hearts, minds and souls.
Their lengthy, ambitious program featured two quartets: A stunningly played No. 5, from the so-called First Period; and No. 15 from the Third. Sandwiched between them was Shostakovich's Quartet No. 8 (1960), a compact work the composer dedicated to the victims of fascism and war.
Beethoven wrote Quartet No. 15, a longish, five-movement work, two years before his death. At the time of its composition, the deaf Beethoven had just gotten over a life-threatening stomach ailment.
Accordingly, its third movement makes references to a new-found strength in several robust andante sections and thanks God in chorale-like sections marked molto adagio.
The Emerson players, using tightly controlled vibrato, made the chorale sections wail with a sustained tension that nearly bordered on religious hysteria. Few groups can make slow music sound so engaging; the Emerson is one of them. The andante, with its wide intervallic leaps and trills, conjured up images of a dignified, stately march.
Other movements went just as well.
The Shostakovich is a hastily written pastiche that quotes material from several compositions, including a cello concerto and the Second Piano Trio. But thanks to the Emerson's crisp reading, it exemplified concise writing that makes its point compellingly. Some highlights included a fast-and-furious ostinato that recalled similar material in Symphony No. 8. And despite three brutish chords played with gung-ho attack, a faint, sustained note in the first violin held on to the last vestiges of humanity.