Stringing Together a Trio of Midyear Winners

The Emerson String Quartet, the nominal tough guys of today’s chamber music scene, as the Juilliard Quartet was in an earlier era, demolish that stereotype in a new coupling of Dvorak’s Quintet in A, Opus 81, and Quartet in E-flat, Opus 87. The pianist in both is Menahem Pressler (Deutsche Grammophon 439 868).

It is one of those releases that leave the writer struggling for and ultimately discarding superlatives. Clearly, it evidences not so much a “different” Emerson from the one responsible for the icily brilliant, award-winning set of Bartok quartets and other hard-hearted thrillers, but another, previously unexposed facet of the Emerson’s wide-ranging, complex interpretive persona.

Partial credit, of course, belongs to the liberating presence of Pressler, the nonpareil chamber music pianist, who seemingly inspires his colleagues to play not only with their customary technical command but also with an intense, full-blown Romantic style that takes the breath away.

And everything sounds so natural: the little Luftpausen and portamentos and such touches as repeated string phases never precisely mirroring each other (e.g., the numerous times when, say, the violin’s tune is taken up by the cello, it isn’t literally duplicated; rather, its articulation is subtly, enhancingly varied).

Masterful details, within the context of interpretations as lyrical as they are dramatic, and Pressler not so much the star as the center of a perfect chamber music cosmos.

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The Bartok Quartet of Budapest has never been accused of being tough, or perfect. If “soulless perfection” is a description that has--simplistically--been ascribed to the Emerson’s way with Bartok the composer, then his namesake quartet can be credited with soulful imperfection.

The Hungarians’ set of the Bartok Six, mentioned in passing in this column some months ago, at which time it was unavailable in the United States, has finally arrived (Canyon Classics 3698, three CDs).

Granted, you don’t have to be Hungarian to “know” Bartok. But there can be little doubt that the composer’s countrymen have tended to see his music as much in the light of a sort of somber, late-blooming Romanticism as a reflection of modern-era tensions. The duality is keenly projected by these four artists, who have lived with the music for so long and so intimately that each is able to make his presence felt within the context of an ensemble view.

These are grand, sometimes darkly humorous, always warm-toned interpretations. The listener who demands that every note is hit dead-center, with not a ragged ensemble edge showing, should apply elsewhere. If, however, you can tolerate some flawed humanity along with the heart and soul of these inexhaustibly rich creations, by all means try the Bartok Quartet’s Bartok.

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The Los Angeles Piano Quartet makes one of its infrequent recorded outings with a smashing pairing of Gabriel Faure’s quartets for their combination of instruments, the familiar work in C minor and the unaccountably lesser-known one in G minor.

This exquisitely voluptuous stuff was made to order for the highly expressive style of the LAPQ: pianist James Bonn (the only one of the four still locally based), violinist Joseph Genualdi, violist Randolph Kelly and cellist Peter Rejto.

The close-up recording is well suited to the music as well, clarifying textures while maintaining sufficient air around the players to preserve the composer’s often dreamlike harmonic states (IMP/Pickwick Masters 66).

In contrast to Sony’s all-star team of Emanuel Ax, Isaac Stern, Jaime Laredo and Yo-Yo Ma, who brutalized both scores with their every-man-for-himself slugfest, the LAPQ has, in common with the two string quartets previously cited, the ability to function as a tightly knit unit without denying its members a large measure of personal freedom.

It’s one of the important, often overlooked things great chamber music is about.