Emerson String Quartet
All Recordings
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"Among the finest quartets playing now." —Penguin Guide
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"There's hardly a weak song in the collection. Hampson brings to this music a remarkable range of expression and colour. Studer provides the vocal glamour, the ability to sketch long curves and floated high notes that Barber so often demanded. The recorded sound is flawless." —Gramophone
When arguments about the greatest living quartet begin, one choice remains non-controversial: the Emerson String Quartet. -Boston Herald
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"Among the finest quartets playing now." —Penguin Guide
counts as 3
When arguments about the greatest living quartet begin, one choice remains non-controversial: the Emerson String Quartet. -Boston Herald
Composers
Biography
- Founded 1976
Since its formation in 1976, the Emerson String Quartet has gradually achieved recognition as one of the world's top chamber ensembles. The group's reputation partially rests upon its daring interpretations of core string quartet repertory: it has performed the complete quartet cycles of Beethoven, Shostakovich, and {Bartók} in major concert halls around the world, and its interpretations tend toward the personal, the passionate, and even the hell-for-leather. Audiences have responded to the quartet's involvement with the music it performs; the Emerson (named for Ralph Waldo Emerson) has recorded prolifically since signing with the Deutsche Grammophon label in 1987, and the quartet has won six Grammy awards, including two for Best Classical Album.
One of those awards came in 1989, for a recording of the six {Bartók} string quartets that the Emerson made after presenting all six works in a single concert for its debut at New York's Carnegie Hall (the {Bartók} discs also won Gramophone's Record of the Year award in Britain). That concert typified the quartet's programming philosophy; the Emerson has attracted both devotees and newcomers with music-making that is ambitious, intellectually challenging, and at the same time a bit extreme in such a way as to attract widespread attention. In 1997 the Emerson presented Beethoven's cycle of 16 quartets in a group of eight concerts at New York's Lincoln Center, each featuring two Beethoven quartets paired with modern works that showed the extent of Beethoven's long shadow in some way. Since its founding, the Emerson has actively commissioned new works from a variety of composers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, ranging from the difficult Wolfgang Rihm to the accessible Edgar Meyer.
The members of the Emerson String Quartet -- violinists Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer, violist Lawrence Dutton, and cellist David Finckel -- have maintained top-flight solo careers of their own. In 2002 they became quartet-in-residence at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Their long list of awards includes the prestigioius Avery Fisher Prize for 2004.
In later years, the Emerson's projects were inclined toward the collaborative. Their 2000 performance of the Shostakovich quartets culminated in a multimedia work called The Noise of Time, which mixed the quartet's performance of the composer's String Quartet No. 15 with film, dance, and taped readings. In early 2005, the Emerson presented Mendelssohn's quartets in both New York and England, juxtaposed with works by other composers in Mendelssohn's temporally diverse orbit. ~ James Manheim, All Music Guide
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