What didn't fail was the Emersons' commitment. Mr. Setzer, playing first violin in the G major quartet (he and Mr. Drucker trade places throughout the group's repertoire), let the musical shrug at the start emerge without any fuss, but with unmistakable respect for the more complex journey that would follow it. In the second, slower movement, he all but sang the melody, and yet never lost its inner strength. Mr. Dutton, in moments where the viola stands out, was strong and forthright. Mr. Finckel watched the others, alertly following and at times anticipating them.
That's one aspect of a string quartet -- teamwork. As I watched in Tully Hall, I could see the group thinking together as it played, with an agreement that sometimes looked so tightly wound that I wondered if Beethoven's path had become predictable. But then a surprise would come -- somebody would cut a little deeper, and the others, responding, would sharpen their devotion, too.
Next came Berg's string quartet, Op. 3, programmed as part of another Emerson plan, to provide contrast and a deeper context by adding something from our own century to each Beethoven event. The Berg, a youthful, loose, uneven piece from 1910, felt like a detour to a gallery hung with abstract art, where every painting shapes itself with troubled, drunken curves.
Though when the Emersons returned with one of Beethoven's late quartets, the one in E flat major, Op. 127, they didn't need a context, because the late quartets create a context of their own. They arose, as Mr. Drucker says, from solitude, from an isolation that came "not just from Beethoven's deafness, but also from his irascible personality, and his certainty that he had to bear his suffering alone." In his loneliness, Beethoven found both a pain and a transcendent acceptance that seem all but universal.
The E flat quartet starts with solid affirmation that all at once evaporates, leaving music that could almost have been woven out of air. I didn't think the Emersons quite found their footing here, but then I might have been at fault. Mr. Drucker, in his gentle way, had confessed that (like any human) he doesn't always play his best. "But," objected Mr. Finckel to him, "I'd venture to say that your concentration wavers less than any critic's." So, for all I know, I might have been the one who wasn't fully there.

By the second movement, all of us had found our way. The path led deep into Beethoven's hidden world, and now it was Mr. Drucker's turn, on first violin, to sing. In liner notes to the CD box he says he sometimes plays with tears in his eyes, and I can well believe it. Seconded by Mr. Finckel, he found the center of his melody, stretching always forward, never slackening, each new variation of the theme emerging in the same tone as the last, implacable, but awe-struck.
The third movement, an edgy dance, exploded as the quartet launched its middle section at what must have been the fastest tempo possible. That at last explained a riddle of the group's Op. 127 recording. It seems to slacken in the fourth and final movement, where Beethoven gets wilder still, writing music that I thought should hurtle in a tumbling rush. But now I realized that the Emersons had already hurtled. Now they could pull back, and revel in the final movement's crazy clomping heaviness. They tore into it, pushing their sound even toward an ugly edge.
That, though, is part of their approach to Beethoven, whom they see as a man of contrasts and extremes. Their fast tempi are a deliberate choice, inspired partly by Beethoven's own controversial indications -- late in life, he specified rapid speeds in precisely measured beats per minute (but he was deaf, so how could he know if he was right?) -- and partly by their reading of his character. Here, ironically, their critics can pin charges of superficiality on something that's really there, on the headlong rush, and also on the heavy, sometimes violent accents the quartet thinks come naturally in Beethoven. All this can seem external, even arbitrary, though Mr. Setzer knows they aren't. I asked him why he so deeply stressed an accent at the start of another late quartet, the one in C sharp minor, and he said he didn't concentrate on stresses. "I sit there before I start that movement," he answered, "and all I think about is Beethoven, and the terror that he must have felt."
Which leads me -- forgive me, Mr. Finckel -- to one suggestion. The Emersons, for all their power and intensity, play Beethoven in black-and-white. In another kind of playing (one the group might move toward, as it continues to explore), the silence that surrounds the late quartets has a color of its own. It's all but audible, and the hush, coming from within, tints even the most violent moments. Mr. Dutton told me that when he first heard Beethoven's Op. 132, the most intimate of all the late quartets, a march that shatters the calm of its slow movement shocked him. The Emersons don't shrink from shocks. But could they vary their tone as well as their attack, and find a subtly different shade for every episode -- every outburst, every whisper, every hesitation -- without losing the deeper hue that binds the whole into a higher unity?

Wall Street Journal, December 24, 1997

Listen to the Emerson Quartet! Here's a brief RealAudio excerpt from the third movement of Op. 127. As I wrote, they play just about as fast as anyone could, and fiercely, too. But this is only their recording. At the concert, they played even faster and fiercer. Their conviction -- and, of course, their technical polish -- is something to hear. If you don't have the RealAudio player, you can download it here. You can also download this RealAudio file and play it offline. (46k)