Emerson String Quartet brings new lineup to Spivey Hall

Violinist Eugene Drucker, co-founder of the Emerson String Quartet, doesn't envy young players just starting out in the competitive landscape of chamber music.

When Drucker and violinist Philip Setzer co-founded the quartet, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, it was less challenging for a young group to embark upon a successful career. Now, he said, it’s difficult for a fledgling quartet to make an impact because there are so many ensembles competing for a fixed number of concerts.

“We’ve been very fortunate in our career — coming along at a time when the classical music world seemed very hungry for chamber music,” Drucker said from his hotel room in Warsaw, where the group was preparing to perform as part of a nine-city European tour. “It’s an extremely competitive field.”

The Emerson Quartet will visit Spivey Hall at Clayton State University at 3 p.m. Sunday. The group’s program includes an early Beethoven string quartet, Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 10 in A-flat major and the sprawling String Quartet in G Major, D. 887, by Franz Schubert.

The ensemble won Grammys for its recordings of Shostakovich’s complete quartets, in 2000, and the full Beethoven quartets, in 1997, and has won a total of nine Grammys across four decades. Its latest release, from September, brings together Alban Berg’s “Lyric Suite” and Egon Wellesz’s “Sonnets by Elizabeth Barrett-Browning” and features a guest appearance by soprano Renee Fleming.

While demand for chamber music is relatively strong, Drucker admitted that the music-making business has changed drastically. When Emerson broke out with a recording contract for Deutsche Grammophon in 1987, the ensemble was able to record multivolume, expansive works. These recordings were an immersive experience, presenting the group’s interpretation of a composer’s complete chamber works. Now, he said, recording companies only want a single disc of music, a byproduct of an iTunes model where listeners pick and choose tracks, rarely purchasing an entire disc of material.

In addition, record companies now commit to only one release per year, he said. Artists now also have more responsibility for marketing.

“People have to rise to the challenge of new ways of presenting one’s group … without seeming gimmicky,” he said.

One of the largest changes to the quartet occurred in May 2013, when longtime cellist David Finckel left the group to focus on his duties at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. In a group of only four musicians, replacing 25 percent of the ensemble could have been a disaster. Drucker said cellist Paul Watkins took up the mantle with relative ease; Watkins quickly endeared himself to the musicians, digging through Emerson’s sizable catalog of repertory.

The quartet’s sound, however, has shifted. Prefacing that his comments are a sweeping generalization, Drucker said Watkins’ cello voice is deeper and darker than his predecessor’s.

“(A new cellist) will affect the sound of the ensemble — I think more than if you changed a violist in a quartet or a second violinist in a quartet,” he said. “The cello really provides the foundation for the sound of a string quartet.”

Even though Watkins’ interpretation of the music is of a mind with the previous cellist, the tonal color shift and the addition of a new personality to the group have been enough to transform some of Emerson’s well-trodden repertoire. With that one lineup shift, the quartet’s concert at Spivey Hall, though it’s filled with compositions the group has performed numerous times over the years, should sound fresh and new.