EMERSONIAN REFLECTIONS
posted by James Reel
The Arizona Friends of Chamber Music, which I help run, is opening its season tonight with a performance by the Emerson Quartet. This group’s concerts in Tucson almost always sell out—at least the concerts AFCM presents do—and with good reason. I suspect sometime in the near future we’d be well advised to book the quartet for a double engagement. The Emersons could easily offer an entirely different program the second night; indeed, unlike many other ensembles that offer the equivalent of a concert and a half for presenters to choose from, the Emersons generally travel the world with three or four different programs in their fingers.
And they aren’t out there merely giving concerts in order to sell their latest CDs. Sure, they’re offering a fair amount of Mendelssohn this season, the complete Mendelssohn quartets and octet constituting their most recent CD release, but the Emersons are ready and willing to play much more than that. They’re pairing Beethoven and Shostakovich whenever they can these days—they’ve recorded those composers’ complete quartet cycles, but that was some years ago—and coming up with the occaisonal unexpected treasure, too. Tonight’s program consists of Beethoven’s Op. 18 No. 6, Shostakovich’s tenth quartet and Sibelius’ “Voces Intimae.” If you can’t get into the concert, we’ll probably be broadcasting it on KUAT-FM about a year from now.
We didn’t ask the Emersons to play Mendelssohn here because we’ll have the Pacifica Quartet doing that later this season (the Pacifica’s fine Mendelssohn CD set was released just a few weeks after the Emersons’). If you’re curious about the Emersons’ work with Mendelssohn—especially their decision to record all eight parts of Mendelssohn’s Octet—you might like to read the cover story I wrote for last May’s issue of Strings magazine. The article gets a little technical near the end—the magazine is intended for string players—but violinist Eugene Drucker’s love of Mendelssohn comes through from the very beginning.
