Emerson String Quartet

Eugene Drucker, violin
Philip Setzer, violin
Lawrence Dutton, viola
David Finckel, cello

Web Address:
www.emersonquartet.com

Photo Credit: Mitch Jenkins

The Emerson String Quartet stands alone in the history of string quartets with an unparalleled list of achievements over three decades: thirty acclaimed recordings produced with Deutsche Grammophon since 1987, eight Grammy® Awards (including two for Best Classical Album, an unprecedented honor for a chamber music group), three Gramophone Awards, the coveted Avery Fisher Prize and cycles of the complete Beethoven, Bartók, Mendelssohn and Shostakovich string quartets in the world's musical capitals, from New York to London to Vienna. The Quartet has collaborated in concerts and on recordings with some of the greatest artists of our time. After more than 32 years of extensive touring and recording, the Emerson Quartet continues to perform with the same benchmark integrity, energy and commitment that it has demonstrated since it was formed in 1976.

Throughout its history, the Emerson String Quartet has garnered an international reputation for groundbreaking chamber music projects and correlated recordings for Deutsche Grammophon. In 1988, the Quartet attracted national attention with the presentation of the six Bartók quartets in a single evening for its Carnegie Hall debut. The Emerson's subsequent release of the cycle received the 1989 Grammy® Awards for "Best Classical Album" and "Best Chamber Music Performance" and Gramophone Magazine's 1989 "Record of the Year Award" - the first time in the history of each award that a chamber music ensemble had ever received the top prize.

In March 1997, the Quartet released a seven-disc set of the complete Beethoven quartets and organized a series of performances over two seasons at New York's Lincoln Center entitled "Beethoven and the Twentieth Century," a total of eight concerts that each paired two Beethoven quartets with a twentieth-century composition. Initial reviews of this series were so strong that the remaining performances were completely sold out; the Beethoven recording earned a Grammy® Award for "Best Chamber Music Album."

Recordings on the Deutsche Grammophon label include the most recent release, May 2009's Intimate Letters, featuring chamber works by Janácek and Martinu, J.S. Bach Fugues from "The Well Tempered Clavier", the Grammy® Award- winning Intimate Voices, a recording of Grieg, Nielsen and Sibelius string quartets, and the complete Mendelssohn string quartets and octet, which received 2005 Grammy® Awards for "Best Chamber Music Performance" and "Best Engineered Album, Classical." The Emerson Quartet has also recorded Haydn's Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross, Bach's Art of Fugue, The Haydn Project (a selection of seven quartets from various periods of Haydn's career) and The Emerson Encores, preceded by interpretations of quartets by Schumann, Brahms, Dvorák, Smetana, Tchaikovsky, Borodin and Prokofiev, the set of six quartets Mozart dedicated to Haydn, the Schubert Cello Quintet with Mstislav Rostropovich, the Schumann Piano Quintet and Quartet with Menahem Pressler, Dvorák Piano Quintet and Quartet with Pressler, and the complete string works of Anton Webern and Samuel Barber's Dover Beach with baritone Thomas Hampson. Several of these recordings were nominated for Grammy® Awards. In 1994, the Emerson won its third Grammy®, for "Best Chamber Music Recording" with a disc of "American Originals" - the quartets of Ives and Barber.

Formed in the bicentennial year of the United States, the Emerson String Quartet took its name from the great American poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. Violinists Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer alternate in the first chair position and are joined by violist Lawrence Dutton and cellist David Finckel. The Quartet has performed numerous benefit concerts for causes ranging from nuclear disarmament to campaigns against AIDS, world hunger and children's diseases. The Quartet members were honored by the Governor of Connecticut for their outstanding cultural contributions to the state, and in 1994 received the University Medal for Distinguished Service from the University of Hartford, where they were quartet-in-residence for two decades until 2002. In 1995, each member was awarded an honorary doctoral degree by Middlebury College in Vermont. They have also received a Smithson Award from the Smithsonian Institution. In 2006, the quartet received an honorary doctorate from Wooster College, where it has performed frequently. In May 2009, the four musicians were honored with a doctorate from Bard College.

"America's greatest quartet." - Time Magazine

"The Emerson has the traditional string-quartet virtues; each player is a strongly characterized individual, but the ensemble is temperamentally as well as sonically in balance. The four minds play upon each other, and upon the work, in perfect harmony; the players are in tune in all senses of the phrase." - The New Yorker

"The Emerson gives us playing of exceptional technical accomplishment and an unusually wide expressive range. They continually offer new insights into some endlessly enthralling music. Do hear them." - Gramophone