Emerson String Quartet Essentials

Some string quartets appear to last forever, sustained by a turnover of membership as players come and go. But others reach a point where it feels right to say goodbye. Bowing out in the autumn of 2023 was one of the most celebrated of American quartets, the Emerson: founded in 1976 and running almost seamlessly for the past 47 years. From more or less the start, there’s only been one player change—in 2013, when Paul Watkins joined as cellist. Otherwise violinists Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer met as students at the Juilliard School, teaming up with violist Lawrence Dutton soon after. And the rest has been history—with an astonishing recorded legacy to show for it that covers vast tracts of the repertoire, and groans under the weight of accolades (nine Grammys and three Gramophone Awards included). “We were grateful that we came on the scene just before the advent of the CD,” Drucker tells Apple Music Classical, “when classical music lovers were replacing large parts of their LP collections with the new product. Signed up by Deutsche Grammophon, we rode the crest of a wave in terms of demand.” Demand enabled them to be completist, recording the entire quartets of Shostakovich, Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn and Schumann. There are also quantities of Mozart, Haydn, Schubert and Dvořák, with incursions into Britten, Janáček, Prokofiev and American repertoire. And if you ask why the completism didn’t quite extend to some of those core-repertory giants, Philip Setzer explains that it wasn’t for lack of love. “Where we’ve recorded everything it’s because we felt there were no weak examples in the collection; and much as I love Schubert, his quartets can be uneven. Mozart has beautiful things in the early quartets but not on the same level as the later ones. And same with Dvořák, who learned as he went along.” Had time allowed, though, everyone agrees there would have been more Mozart—and there nearly was for their farewell release. Instead, they went for something very different. Repertoire that you could call off-piste, including Schoenberg’s Quartet No. 2, which pulls into its textures a soprano (here, the charismatic Barbara Hannigan). The Emersons are named after a great American philosopher who famously encouraged his disciples to strike out where there’s no path but to leave a trail. Those 60-plus recordings are a trail of luminous distinction, and you can explore the very best of them in this hand-picked playlist.