With both the Guarneri Quartet and the Beaux Arts Trio having recently closed up shop, a generational shift has been occurring in the upper ranks of American chamber ensembles. Founded in 1976, the Emerson String Quartet is now one of the longest running groups out there. The veteran foursome glided into Jordan Hall on Friday night still looking pleased to be sharing a stage together. Perhaps one key to the group’s longevity is the independence of the players’ artistic lives. Cellist David Finckel, for instance, also codirects the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and violinist Eugene Drucker published a Holocaust novel in 2007. The quartet, in other words, becomes a central meeting place of four broadly engaged musicians.
Emerson Quartet diverse as ever
Friday’s Celebrity Series recital featured something of a grab bag with Ives’s Quartet No. 1, Janacek’s Quartet No. 1, the Adagio from Barber’s Quartet Op. 11, and Shostakovich’s Quartet No. 9. As a program it didn’t really cohere, that is, no two adjacent works seemed to have much to say to one another, or interest in their more distant neighbors. But each was dispensed with easy authority and impeccable ensemble work, culminating in some white-hot Shostakovich playing that drew the night to a harrowing close.
The Ives is an early piece that pulls from the composer’s academic study at Yale and his work as a church organist during his school years. Naturally, the ear searches for seeds of the future iconoclast, and there are plenty here in the dissonant mischief he manages with various hymn tunes. The Emersons conveyed it all with a big warm tone and playing that was clear and muscular. Janacek’s tumultuous First Quartet, nicknamed “The Kreutzer Sonata’’ after the Tolstoy novella, followed in an alert and theatrically rich performance that built with a majestic intensity in its surging final pages.
Despite a sensitive reading, the Barber Adagio, better known in its famous arrangement for string orchestra, felt more like a nod to reassuring familiarity than an organic addition to this program on its own terms. All memories of it were in any case quickly obliterated by the epic Ninth Quartet of Shostakovich, a composer whose musical and expressive language the Emersons speak with wonderful fluency. It was all here: the raw insistent tone, the sharp dry attacks, the acid humor, the massive thwacking pizzicatos, the signature blend of tragedy with some kind of defiant spiritual grandeur.
The Ninth’s final movement contains a savage, hurtling fugue that could only be written by a man who had internalized the experience of being hunted. Yes, these quartets should by now be granted freedom from the burden of speaking for their times, but I’m still not sure how one universalizes music of such shattering personal specificity. The Emersons played as if there was something far larger than an encore at stake.
Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com.
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