Emerson Quartet Ends SFP Chamber Series

Emerson String Quartet players Paul Watkins, Eugene Drucker, Philip Setzer, and Lawrence Dutton (photograph by Jürgen Frank, courtesy of SFP)

Last night in Herbst Theatre, San Francisco Performances (SFP) concluded its Shenson Chamber Series with the return of the Emerson String Quartet for its seventh appearance under SFP auspices. Violinists Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer and violist Lawrence Dutton have been with the quartet since it was first formed in 1976. Cellist Paul Watkins replaced cellist David Finckel in 2013.

The program prepared for last night could be called “the other three B’s.” Since Johann Sebastian Bach predated the string quartet as we now know it (often credited to Joseph Haydn), Emerson offered an entirely different set of composers whose last names began with a B. In “order of appearance” these were Alexander Borodin, Samuel Barber, and Béla Bartók. (It may be worth noting in passing that, while the original three B’s spanned two centuries, eighteenth and nineteenth, last night’s set linked the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth in a much narrower window. Nevertheless, each of the offerings on last night’s program had its own unique voice.)

Sadly, performance technique tended to be uneven over the course of the program. The most satisfying of the offerings was the final selection, Bartók’s first quartet. This was the only offering of the evening led by Drucker. Under his leadership one could appreciate the long-time familiarity that the ensemble had with the six Bartók quartets. More importantly, one could relish the rich contributions of all four instruments, none of which are allowed very much time for “mere accompaniment.” Writing as one who internalized the Bartók quartets as an undergraduate, I have to say that Drucker’s leadership elicited a freshness of interpretation strong enough to register with me as a “first contact” experience.

Unfortunately, Setzer’s leadership of the first two offerings, Borodin’s second quartet in D major and Barber’s Opus 11 quartet in B minor, was disappointingly weaker. There was often something unsteady about his intonation that disoriented the entire ensemble. Furthermore, the interplay of the individual voices lacked the certainty that made the Bartók performance so satisfying.

Ironically, both of these quartets have “islands of familiarity” that would register with those that do not spend much time with the chamber music genre. Most importantly, the second movement of Barber’s quartet was subsequently repurposed for a string ensemble. In that form it became the “Adagio for Strings,” which now enjoys popular appeal (with a little help from Tinseltown).

However, long before Barber’s Adagio became an “overnight success,” Broadway turned Borodin’s music into a smash hit with a musical entitled Kismet. Two of the songs took their tunes from the Borodin quartet. “Baubles, Bangles and Beads” used the trio portion of the Scherzo (second) movement, while the primary theme of the Noctturno (third) movement became “And This is My Beloved.” Mind you, this show has probably faded into oblivion (the author of the program notes may never have heard of it), allowing the music as Borodin originally wrote it to thrive under more conducive circumstances!

The ensemble returned for an encore that turned out to be rather a surprise. Perhaps, having recognized that they had presented “three alternative B’s,” they saw it fitting to give Bach his due. As a result, they performed a piece of four-voice counterpoint that appeared in the first printed edition of The Art of Fugue but is identified on the music’s Wikipedia page as one of “three pieces of ostensibly spurious inclusion.”

The selection was “spurious” because it was not a fugue. Rather, it was a four-voice setting of an organ chorale prelude on "Vor deinen Thron tret ich hiermit" (“herewith I come before Thy throne"), a chorale prelude based on the BWV 668a setting for organ. Thus, while Bach pre-dated the very idea of a string quartet, Emerson was kind enough to give him the last word in their own “three B’s” program!