The Emerson String Quartet rarely just nibbles at little pieces of repertory; the ensemble is celebrated for throwing itself intensely into a composer’s complete works for string quartet, in concert and on disc. During their nearly 30 years together, the Emersons have recorded highly regarded sets of quartets by Bartók, Beethoven, and Shostakovich, not to mention a selective overview of Haydn. Now the six-time Grammy-winning group, winners of the 2004 Avery Fisher Prize for outstanding achievement and musical excellence, has finally addressed the often-overlooked quartets of Felix Mendelssohn. A boxed set issued in February on the Deutsche Grammophon label includes all the completed mature quartets, a suite of isolated movements from late in Mendelssohn’s life, and, on a bonus disc, a very early and almost universally ignored quartet Mendelssohn wrote when he was 14, plus one of the glories of Mendelssohn’s early career: the Octet, Op. 20. Ever the completists, the Emersons elected to perform all eight parts of Opus 20 themselves, rather than collaborate with a second quartet as they often have in concert.

“We did a quick test recording at least a year before the sessions, just to make sure this wasn’t an insane idea,” says Eugene Drucker, who routinely trades off first-violin duties with fellow Emerson Philip Setzer. “We recorded about 20 measures of each movement, and we were surprised how well it sounded, and how well-matched it all was. With two different quartets performing, it’s hard to match somewhat disparate styles of playing. Now, although the four of us don’t play exactly the same way, we’ve been matching each other when necessary for years. So doing the whole octet ourselves makes the matching part even easier.”

As a treat for the sharp-eared, the Emersons differentiated themselves on the Octet recording as “two” quartets by maintaining a precise seating arrangement and employing two different sets of instruments: for the “first” quartet, a group of classic Italian instruments; for the “second,” a contemporary collection by New York luthier Samuel Zygmuntowicz.

Although the ensemble has only recently recorded the Mendelssohn quartets and octets, most of the music has been on its stands for a couple of decades. Why the delay in taking it to the microphones? “I remember bringing up the idea to DG of recording all the Mendelssohn quartets a long time ago,” says Drucker, “but they were not interested, because they had a good set by the Melos Quartet on LP, which they’d recorded less than ten years before I asked them.

“I’m glad they’ve finally changed their mind.”


Mention Mendelssohn to Drucker these days, and you instantly get the feeling he enjoys talking about the quartets almost as much as playing them. “They’ve been terribly underrated,” he begins. “Mendelssohn was known as a Classical Romantic. For a lot of pieces in his mature period, he was adhering to the structural forms that had been generated in the Classical period. He used the sonata-allegro format in his first movements, and a modified song form in the second. His scherzo is unique, but in terms of pure form he was adhering to an older structure, based on the minuet. Then he used rondos or sonata-form movements for the end. But if you deeply examine Mendelssohn’s body of work, he’s not such a conservative.

“In the first two quartets, he was experimenting with cyclical form and showing an astonishing ability to understand the Beethoven quartets. Cyclical form is a quintessentially Romantic idea; perhaps he got that from Beethoven’s Ninth. It’s the idea that we the listeners are transformed by the experience we undergo through the course of the work, so when material reappears at the end it takes on a different coloration.”