Around the Music Festival

The Emerson String Quartet, one of America’s leading string quartets, held a farewell concert at New York’s Lincoln Center, its home ground, on October 22. The Emerson String Quartet has been active for 47 years, and has been exclusively contracted with the Gramophone label of Germany, winning six Grammy Awards for Best Chamber Music Recording in the United States.

The founding members are Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer on violin, Guillermo Figueroa on viola, and Eric Wilson on cello, named after the American poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. The main characteristic of the group has been that the first and second violins alternate according to the piece.

Based in New York State, the quartet is characterized by shading and light rhythmic expression, and specializes in modern and contemporary works by Debussy, Ravel, Ives, Bartók, Shostakovich, and Barber.

They were the first resident quartet of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center from 1982 to 1989. They aiso the first string quartet in the Society’s history to perform the complete Beethoven string quartets, and the first to perform all six Bartók quartets in one evening.

The current members are Drucker and Setzer with Lawrence Dutton on viola and Paul Watkins on cello, and at their farewell concert they performed Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 13 and the Grand Fugue, plus Schubert’s String Quintet, op. 163. The quintet was joined in the performance by cellist David Finckel, a member of the quartet from 1979 to 2013.

The quartet will no longer perform as a group, but each member will continue to perform as an individual and will continue to teach younger musicians at the Emerson String Quartet Institute at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and other institutions. There are also plans to release a documentary on the last year of their activities.

Photo：Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center　/　Da Ping Luo