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      Review: An Unexpectedly Relevant Oratorio at the Philharmonic

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      Planned over a year ago, Handel’s “Israel in Egypt” was presented while the Israel-Hamas war unfolds in the Middle East.Handel is not a composer typically associated with controversy, but the New York Philharmonic found itself entering a difficult public discourse with its performances of the oratorio “Israel in Egypt” this week at David Geffen Hall.As thousands have died in the Israel-Hamas war, and as the conflict has inflamed tensions around the world, Cambridge University’s opera society has canceled a performance of Handel’s “Saul,” which depicts the Israelite David’s victory over the Philistine Goliath. That is the oratorio Handel wrote before “Israel in Egypt,” about a powerless people fleeing the subjugation of an oppressive state.“Israel in Egypt” is less dramatic than “Saul,” and for its concerts, the Philharmonic opted for a program note. In it, the organization’s leadership clarified that this week’s performances were planned more than a year ago and added, “What we could not have anticipated is recent world events, making the timing of this program particularly relevant.”The oratorio’s tale could have been a source of empathy and catharsis for audiences, but that’s not exactly the piece Handel wrote. For those familiar with “Messiah,” Handel’s other English-language oratorio that lifts its text from Scripture, “Israel in Egypt” is an oddity. Written almost entirely for choral forces, with few showpieces for the soloists, it narrates the Jewish exodus that Moses led from Egypt. To modern ears, the text painting of the 10 plagues is so lightweight that it verges on silliness: The orchestra leaps to depict frogs, buzzes for flies and thumps for hailstones.Still, the melancholy-saturated lamentation that opens the piece, and the triumphant choruses that close it, adds substance. And on Wednesday, the conductor and Baroque specialist Jeannette Sorrell led a sonorous performance, drawing captivating singing from the choristers of Apollo’s Fire and intermittently inspiring the Philharmonic’s players to embrace fleeter, Handelian style on their modern instruments.The Apollo’s Fire chorus, a gem of an ensemble, anchored the evening with a beguiling sound. In the big, unified moments, the voice parts stacked atop one another in pellucid columns. Tricky double choruses and fugues had a lucent, weightless, nimble quality.Sorrell’s brisk adaptation trims the score to roughly 80 minutes, which offset the orchestra’s occasionally slackened energy. She wisely reinstated the intensely emotional, sometimes cut lamentation (a decision she also made on a recently released recording with Apollo’s Fire). With a theatrical flourish, she cut short the Exodus section so that it concluded with a thrilling depiction of Pharaoh’s army drowning in the Red Sea.Among the vocal soloists, Amanda Forsythe demonstrated a limpid soprano in “Thou didst blow,” and Edward Vogel showed a rather appealing, midweight baritone in his insertion aria, “To God our strength” (aided by Christopher Martin’s dignified trumpet solo). The tenor Jacob Perry and the soprano Sonya Headlam filled their music with character, and the countertenor Cody Bowers sang with a beautifully shaped tone and enthusiasm to spare.Handel devoted much of the final section, “Moses’ Song,” to a triumphant account of the Red Sea’s parting. In “The depths have covered them,” the strings were as broad and far-reaching as the water’s surface. In the score and the story it recounts, the moment is a deus ex machina. Today, though, we do not live in a time of miracles.New York PhilharmonicPerformed on Wednesday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Review: Years Late, a Young Pianist Finally Gets to Carnegie

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      Alexandre Kantorow made his Carnegie Hall recital debut after winning both the International Tchaikovsky Competition and the Gilmore Artist Award.The French pianist Alexandre Kantorow was supposed to make his Carnegie Hall recital debut on March 25, 2020, as a late replacement for the ailing Murray Perahia. We know what happened with that.When Kantorow, 26, finally made it to Carnegie on Sunday afternoon, it was again as a substitute for an eminent colleague, this time Maurizio Pollini. The symbolism of the rise of a new generation of performers was hard for me to miss, especially since after Kantorow’s recital, I walked to Alice Tully Hall to witness the Emerson String Quartet’s exquisite retirement concert.This wasn’t Kantorow’s first time playing at Carnegie; he performed two pieces at Zankel Hall in 2019, as one of the winners of that year’s International Tchaikovsky Competition. But Sunday’s very fine recital, on the hall’s main stage, was a wholly different kind of platform.And he arrived with expectations ratcheted up even higher than if he had merely (ha) won the Tchaikovsky. Last month, he received the elusive, prestigious $300,000 Gilmore Artist Award, given to a pianist every four years after a secretive selection process akin to the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” grants; Kantorow didn’t know he’d been under consideration until he found out he had won.The stereotype is that competitions mint quick-fingered but mindless virtuosos, while the Gilmore rewards more mature, idiosyncratic artists. To win both the Tchaikovsky and the Gilmore suggests Kantorow has technical security as well as something to say.That felt true on Sunday. A quick glance at the lineup made this seem a potentially tired program: Brahms, Bach, Liszt, Schubert. But Kantorow chose Brahms’s Sonata No. 1, an unwieldy thicket of notes that is hardly a recital chestnut.And the Bach was Brahms’s austerely grand transcription for left hand of the great Violin Chaconne in D Minor, rather than the more popular, gaudier Busoni transcription for both hands. The Liszt was a set of his renderings of Schubert songs, none omnipresent and one never before played at Carnegie. Only Schubert’s “Wanderer Fantasy” could be called a true standard.As in his recordings of the other two Brahms piano sonatas, Kantorow approached this one with a poetically heavy use of rubato, the expressive stretching and pressing of tempo from moment to moment.It was often beautiful; in the first movement, the section before the recapitulation of the theme gave the sense of emerging from fire into quiet, snowy night. And — or, depending on your preferences, but — it conveyed atmosphere better than structure.Kantorow brought a peppery spirit to the Scherzo that turned it into something of a danse macabre. Both this and the fourth movement were exceptionally, even a little drainingly fast — more Presto than Allegro — but never muddied.His account of Brahms’s Bach was rigorous yet rich, with well-judged ebbs and flows of intensity and amplitude. Of the five Liszt-Schubert transcriptions, most interesting was the one new to Carnegie: “Die Stadt,” a collision of the song’s moodiness with Lisztian extroversion, sprays of notes drizzling out of the gloom.It attests to Kantorow’s subtlety and focus that there was no applause between these pieces and the “Wanderer Fantasy,” which felt as if it had emerged from Schubert’s songs — the opening more modest and lyrical than the usual bombast. This was assured, eloquent playing, the lines clear and balanced in each hand even in the chaos near the end of the piece.There is intriguing tension between Kantorow’s lucid, pearly touch and the Romantic wildness of his music-making. The two sides were in memorable balance in his encores: transcriptions of “Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix,” from Saint-Saëns’s “Samson et Dalila,” and the finale of Stravinsky’s “Firebird.” They brought together suavity and showmanship.Alexandre KantorowPerformed on Sunday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Review: The Great Emerson String Quartet Takes Its Final Bow

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      A pillar of chamber music for nearly a half-century, the Emerson players bid farewell with Beethoven’s Opus 130 and Schubert’s String Quintet.Farewell to the Emerson String Quartet, a group that has beaten at the heart of chamber music in the United States, and far beyond, for almost half a century.More than two years after the essential string quartet of its era announced that it had decided to retire, its players took their final bows on Sunday before an Alice Tully Hall audience that paid them the best tribute any musician can hope to receive: listening, and listening well.The time was right, and the place was, too. It was on a Sunday in 1981 that the Emerson made its breakthrough on that very stage, playing all six Bartok quartets in a single, three-and-a-half-hour-plus sitting. The host of Sunday’s concert, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, is the institution for which the Emerson served as quartet in residence from 1982 to 1989, and for which its cellist David Finckel left the ensemble in 2013 to co-direct.Finckel’s departure permitted his successor, Paul Watkins, to spend a decade with the violinists Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer to his right, and Lawrence Dutton, the violist, to his left. Even at the end, as Finckel rejoined the group for one last performance of the Schubert String Quintet, Watkins looked as if he could barely believe his luck.Who would feel any differently? For if Sunday’s concert was a reminder of anything, it was that the Emerson String Quartet was never just a string quartet. It was an establishment, a touchstone, a catalyst. Entire generations of listeners grew up with its recordings, or made one of the hundred and more concerts it undertook each year, with famous collegiality, a habitual date in their diaries. As early as 1984, George Tsontakis had composed it a piece called “Emerson,” as if it already owned the genre; Sarah Kirkland Snider, the last living composer whose music it played, has written that, to her, the Emerson catalog had appeared to be “the definitive interpretation of all the great string quartets in history.”From left, Drucker, Setzer, Watkins and Dutton in the concert’s first half.Da Ping LuoWas the Emerson the Emerson to the end? Close enough. “We were afraid of going on too long,” Setzer said recently, and Sunday suggested that he, Drucker and Dutton have stopped at the timeliest of moments, without cause for regret. Watkins, a soloist and a conductor before he took his chance, still has half his career ahead of him. There were speeches on Sunday, quiet notes of pathos, even a joke or two, but nothing really to get in the way of the music, which is as it should be. The Schubert received a heartfelt performance of inimitable focus, and before it came Beethoven’s Opus 130, with the “Grosse Fuge” duly included as its finale. It was exactly the valediction that one would have hoped for.It was also touching. Nobody could pretend that Sunday saw the Emerson reclaim the heights from which it conquered chamber music, though it was hardly far-off. If its most celebrated predecessors, the Juilliard after World War II and the Guarneri later on, were responsible for a boom in American quartet playing, then it was the Emerson’s part to demonstrate how accomplished a quartet could become. Surely it was not a coincidence that Setzer, who once told The New York Times that “when things aren’t together in the quartet, it sets off a real alarm,” was the son of two violinists in George Szell’s Cleveland Orchestra, and taught by two of its concertmasters.It did not take the Emerson long to set the formidable technical standards that we take for granted among chamber musicians today. “After five minutes of playing,” the critic Bernard Holland wrote of that Bartok concert in 1981, “one began to assume perfection. There were no disappointments.” There are none to be heard, either, in the Emerson’s recorded legacy, which, with all its vitality and its security, Deutsche Grammophon ensured defined the sound of a quartet in the digital age. Hearing them now is to be confronted with persistent excellence, an enduring commitment to quality that any musician would be proud of.If there was ever a justified criticism of the Emerson, it was that its playing was too responsible, too objective, too bland. That was not the case at its passing. Rarely can this ensemble have shaped Schubert’s melodies with such humanity and poignancy, or given such a raw, intense account of the Beethoven fugue. The Cavatina, the delicate emotional core of the Opus 130, will resound in the memory as little short of heartbreaking, and for all the right reasons: As its song faltered on the first violin, it seemed to be embraced, as if the other instruments were helping it through.Farewell, then, to the Emerson. But not to what made it great.Emerson String QuartetPerformed on Sunday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Philadelphia Orchestra and Musicians Reach Contract Deal

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      The agreement, which includes salary increases of nearly 16 percent over three years, ends months of tense negotiations.After months of wrangling at the negotiating table, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the union representing its musicians have reached a deal for a new contract.The three-year contract, which the members of the American Federation of Musicians, Local 77, ratified on Saturday, includes salary raises of nearly 16 percent over three years, a central demand of the musicians, who had argued that they were underpaid compared with other leading ensembles.The musicians’ union praised the agreement, which it said also included pay raises for substitutes as well as a requirement that the orchestra increase the number of musicians it hires each year to fill vacancies. The base salary for musicians in the orchestra in the 2022-23 season was $152,256, including compensation for recordings.“We are an ensemble, and we stuck together and refused to accept substandard deal after substandard deal,” David Fay, a double bass player since 1984 and a union leader, said in a statement. “This contract is a victory for the present and future for the Philadelphia Orchestra and its world-class musicians.”The contract was the first that the orchestra has negotiated since the coronavirus pandemic, which put financial strains on the ensemble, forcing the cancellation of more than 200 concerts and resulting in the loss of about $26 million in ticket sales and performance fees.“Our joint challenge was to find a new and financially responsible path forward that recognizes and furthers the placement of the Philadelphia Orchestra as one of the world’s greatest musical ensembles,” said Ralph W. Muller and Michael D. Zisman, who lead the board of the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Kimmel Center Inc., a joint entity that oversees the orchestra.The dispute grew heated over the past several months as orchestra members rejected several proposals from management. A vote in August to authorize a strike, if needed, won the support of 95 percent of those participating. Concerts proceeded as usual and talks continued through the expiration of the old contract in early September.The orchestra has gone through other painful periods in recent decades. It declared bankruptcy in 2011 after the financial crisis but has since balanced its budget and worked to rebuild. Despite expense cuts and bankruptcy, that has not been easy: In 2016, the musicians held a brief strike that began on the night of the orchestra’s season-opening gala. More

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      At the Met, a Refurbished ‘Bohème’ and an Art Deco ‘Ballo’

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      A gift from a board member recently paid for the company to rebuild sets for Franco Zeffirelli’s deathless 1981 production of Puccini’s classic.If you go to “La Bohème” at the Metropolitan Opera this season and are convinced that the big snowdrift in Act III looks a little fresher than usual, you’re not hallucinating.A million-dollar gift from a board member recently paid for the company to rebuild some of the sets for Franco Zeffirelli’s deathless 1981 production of Puccini’s classic, and the snow that dominates a wintry scene on the outskirts of Paris was one of the targets. It now looks more newly fallen — though the seam between the set piece and the stage floor was gapingly obvious from the orchestra level on Saturday evening.Some whiter snow was the news of this “Bohème” — alongside an unusually assertive, stylish Schaunard from the young baritone Sean Michael Plumb, in a small part that often fades into Zeffirelli’s teeming backgrounds.Federica Lombardi’s focused soprano created a Mimì more forthright, even indignant, than the norm, making her fatal Act IV more tender by comparison. The bass-baritone Christian Van Horn sang a soberly resonant “Vecchia zimmara,” and the soprano Olga Kulchynska was a bright Musetta. As Rodolfo, the veteran tenor Matthew Polenzani pushed his voice out at climaxes but otherwise often sounded faded, and a few hairs flat.The sets for David Alden’s 2012 Met staging of Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera” have not been rebuilt — but, only 11 years old, they sometimes seemed shakily resistant to being moved when the opera was revived on Friday.Quinn Kelsey, front left, as Renato and Liv Redpath as Oscar in Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera” at the Met.Ken Howard/Met OperaHere, the cast was the exciting part, at least by the end of the evening. The performance seemed to settle in as it went on, with the tenor Charles Castronovo’s tone as Gustavo — pale for much of the opera — finally taking on more color, fullness and freedom.And after an uncertain beginning, the soprano Angela Meade delivered a memorable Amelia. Her sound is essentially cool, but it got fuller and more inflamed as the weird, tragic plot developed, ending up lean yet glowing, like a red-hot poker.One singer required no warming up: the baritone Quinn Kelsey, who seems ever more a pillar of the Met, particularly in Verdi. “Ballo” is the story of a Swedish king, Gustavo, who is in love with Amelia, the wife of his closest friend — and Kelsey plays Renato, the agonized friend who goes from Gustavo’s confidant to his assassin.His presence hulking and brooding, Kelsey has that most special of operatic attributes: an instantly recognizable voice, capacious and moody, with a smoky, slightly nasal, sneering, sinister edge but also a fundamental seductive smoothness and nuanced eloquence.His and Meade’s back-to-back arias in the third act — her plea “Morrò, ma prima in grazia” into his wounded “Eri tu” — were together the musical highlight on Friday. The mezzo-soprano Olesya Petrova sang Ulrica with steady power, and the soprano Liv Redpath sounded lucid and gentle as the sprightly page Oscar. Carlo Rizzi, one of the Met’s often underappreciated maestros in the Italian repertoire, conducted both “Ballo” (with steady drive) and “Bohème” (with sumptuous clarity).“Ballo,” which premiered in 1859, is from the period after Verdi’s canonical trio of “Rigoletto,” “Il Trovatore” and “La Traviata,” and before his late-stage epics “Don Carlos” and “Aida.” In this middle period — think also of “Les Vêpres Siciliennes” and “La Forza del Destino,” which the Met is presenting in a new production this winter — he experimented with shades of emotional ambiguity and sometimes jarring juxtapositions of tone.In “Ballo,” he combined elements of Italianate melodrama and champagne-bubbly French high spirits in a mixture that can be excitingly volatile. Alden’s staging is a kind of stylized, largely grayscale Art Deco explosion, with a degree of strange excess intended to echo the piece’s own — like a Busby Berkeley production number at the end of the first scene, complete with dancing waiters; and, in Act II, a conspirator frantically hurling himself against a wall.With severely raked sets, sickly floodlighting and surreal touches like skull masks and angel wings, Alden suggests that much of the opera is Gustavo’s fever dream, or fantasy. But the eerie elegance of some moments diffuses elsewhere into some awkwardness, with the chorus milling around. When it premiered, the production seemed like its many ideas hadn’t yet gelled. They still haven’t. More

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      Review: New York Philharmonic Welcomes Back an Old Friend

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      David Robertson returned to the podium to lead the orchestra’s first in a series of performances to celebrate the centennial of Gyorgy Ligeti’s birth.It’s always a good sign when an orchestra’s players light up with smiles at a conductor.And on Thursday night at David Geffen Hall, that happened over and over, with grins passing between the musicians of the New York Philharmonic and its podium guest, David Robertson, throughout a beguiling, smart program.The concert began the Philharmonic’s festivities to celebrate the centennial of the Hungarian-Austrian composer Gyorgy Ligeti’s birth. Robertson led the U.S. premiere of “Mifiso la Sodo,” a short work for chamber orchestra that Ligeti wrote as a student in Budapest in 1948. He began revisions three years later, but never finished the job; the piece lay dormant until last year.With its punchy, fake Italian title, “Mifiso” is crammed full of little musical jokes, show-off brilliance and jovial accents. Ligeti gave it the subtitle “Cheerful Music,” which is both an ironic riposte to the Stalinesque dictums that ruled the Hungarian arts in the 1940s and ’50s and a true description of this piece.Robertson also resurrected a Ligeti work that the Philharmonic hadn’t played since 2004 (conducted by him back then, too): “Concert Romanesc,” or “Romanian Concerto,” a hurricane of color and exuberant virtuosity from 1951 that draws upon Romanian folk music. In this concerto for orchestra, there’s a particularly charming portion in which the basses pluck away, in gritty gutbucket style, while the violins whirl overhead in a zippy dance.Another concerto — the Russian-born, London-based composer Elena Firsova’s Piano Concerto — provided a marked contrast in a delicate work that inverts the genre’s traditional fast-slow-fast structure. Firsova wrote it in 2020 for Yefim Bronfman, who gave its New York premiere on Thursday. (The performance was also the Philharmonic’s first of Firsova’s music.)Firsova’s concerto diverged from the energy of Ligeti by ushering in a meditative pause with a solitudinous, brief introduction. One of her main themes is a wistful, upward-spiraling scale that darts through the piano and the various instruments of the orchestra. Near the end, she retreats into evanescent, gossamer textures from which a haunting, music box-like set of patterns emerges from the glockenspiel, vibraphone, tubular bells and the piano, which is played near the top of its range. Bronfman, an assiduous supporter of Firsova’s work, played with commanding surety.The evening’s second half was devoted to Brahms’s Serenade No. 1, which originally was envisioned as a small chamber piece, but then Brahms kept expanding it. In its final version, the piece’s instrumentation is still lithe — just two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, French horns and trumpets, plus timpani and strings — but the winds and brasses in particular brought in a welcome plushness. The phrasing, under Robertson’s baton, was shapely and intentional, while tracing a persuasive through line back from Ligeti at the start of the program.Robertson’s name has been raised from time to time over the years as a potential music director of the Philharmonic. While that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon, those big grins from players across the stage — not to mention their committed, warm performances — made the musicians’ feelings clear.New York PhilharmonicThrough Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      After 47 Years, the Emerson Quartet Has One More Weekend

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      The group, famed for its rich vitality, easy power and a vast repertory that it recorded prolifically and toured tirelessly, is saying farewell.Five years ago, Eugene Drucker, a violinist in the Emerson String Quartet, got a call from a financial adviser. To sketch out a plan for Drucker, the adviser needed his target retirement age.“When he asked me, it seemed like a fairly academic question,” Drucker, now 71, recalled recently. “The quartet had not at all discussed an endgame.”He told the group the anecdote as something of a joke. (This is a foursome that laughs — a lot.) To his surprise, it spurred a more serious discussion about the future of the Emerson Quartet, one of the most celebrated ensembles in classical music for almost half a century.The conversation eventually led to a decision, and on Saturday and Sunday at Alice Tully Hall — next to the Juilliard School, where the quartet formed — the quartet will play its final concerts. With three members near or over 70, and little desire to keep the name alive without its founders, it’s quitting while it’s ahead.Setzer and Drucker, the violinists at left, were original members of the quartet, which was founded in 1976 when they were students at Juilliard.Amy Lombard for The New York Times“There’s a feeling I think we all had: We were afraid of going on too long,” said Philip Setzer, the other violinist. “People have memories of what it was like to go to an Emerson Quartet concert, and we didn’t want to start having them hear a lesser version of that. I’m a big sports fan, and you see people play past when they should stop.”Lawrence Dutton, the group’s violist, added: “We saw it with teachers and mentors and players we had incredible respect for. It’s not pretty when it happens.”And from its formation in 1976, the Emerson Quartet sounded pretty. It became famous for its rich vitality and easy power in a vast repertory that it recorded prolifically and toured tirelessly.“Particularly in the U.S., the Emerson was maybe the only reference a lot of people had for a string quartet,” said the violinist Ryan Meehan of the Calidore Quartet, one of many younger groups the Emerson has mentored. “It speaks to their incredible artistry and their recording and performing: how far their reach was, even for people who weren’t really classical concertgoers.”Setzer and Drucker met as students of Oscar Shumsky at Juilliard and were original members. In the country’s bicentennial year, it seemed right to name the group after the great idealist American writer.Signing CDs at Watkins’s home. The group recorded profusely for Deutsche Grammophon.Amy Lombard for The New York Times“The sound, the gravitas, the way they treat each other is so beautiful,” the soprano Barbara Hannigan, an Emerson collaborator, said in an interview. “It’s a model for living, really. I’ve never seen any tension between them. I’ve seen discussion and critical thinking, but there’s no ‘this side’ and ‘that side.’”From the Juilliard Quartet, long illustrious by the 1970s, the group learned the lessons of raw vigor and commitment to a broad repertory, including new commissions. Listening to the Guarneri Quartet, younger but already august, the Emerson took on a polished, burnished, sheerly beautiful tone. (For certain listeners, on certain nights, that beauty could tip into blandness.)“There wasn’t really a long-term plan, because we were young,” Drucker said. “But there was the greatness of the repertoire for string quartet. And as a proto-Emerson student group, we had elicited a fairly strong positive reaction, which made an impression on us that this was something to pour energy and time and resources into.”By the end of the ’70s, Dutton and the cellist David Finckel had joined, and the roster was set for more than three decades. It didn’t change until 2013, when Finckel stepped aside to focus on other endeavors, including the leadership of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, which is presenting the finale. He was replaced by Paul Watkins, the baby of the group at 53.Watkins said he prepared for his first session with the others, a kind of audition, by listening to Emerson recordings.The group’s final recording, “Infinite Voyage,” with works by Schoenberg, Hindemith, Berg and Chausson, was released last month.Amy Lombard for The New York Times“But I didn’t want to imitate what David had done,” he added. “I wanted to show that I could be sympathetic to them, and bring my own personality and sound into it as well. It needed to happen instinctively, and quickly: love at first sound. And thank god, it did.”A quartet is an intimate, intense unit — “a benevolent four-headed monster,” Hannigan said. Peter Mennin, then the president of Juilliard, went to an early Emerson concert and told its members that if they could survive five years, they might be able to go the distance.Five years later, in 1981, came a milestone: a marathon performance of Bartok’s six string quartets at Tully Hall for the composer’s centennial, two and a half hours of demanding, opulently bristling music. Many groups were playing the works that year, but not like that.“At first people said, ‘That’s ridiculous; you’re just doing it for show,’” Setzer said. But the concert was an unlikely sensation, establishing the Emerson as an ensemble to be reckoned with.The group was also notable (and, initially, somewhat polarizing) for having Drucker and Setzer switch between the first and second violin parts for different pieces. This is common in student ensembles, but professional quartets usually have set first and second violinists.At Alice Tully Hall, the musicians will play Beethoven’s Opus 130 and Schubert’s Cello Quintet, in which David Finckel, a former member, will join them.Amy Lombard for The New York Times“It’s close to 300 pieces we’ve done, which is a lot,” Setzer said. “And part of that was because of the switching. I can’t imagine doing that amount if I’d had to do first violin in all of it.”With a smooth, vigorous, cleanly modern sound that also nodded to the golden glow of an earlier era, the Emerson was, Dutton said, “at the right place at the right time, blossoming just as the CD boom was happening.” The ensemble scored a contract with the eminent label Deutsche Grammophon, which wanted new digital versions of as much music as the group could set down.The explosion of albums made the Emerson omnipresent, and included benchmark recordings of the complete Beethoven, Shostakovich and Bartok quartets. And there is also — among some three days’ worth of recorded sound — warmly lucid Bach, Haydn and Mozart; nostalgic yet energetic Dvorak and Tchaikovsky; and contemporary music by composers as different as Gunther Schuller and Ned Rorem.All this was toured indefatigably, with over 140 concerts one year. “The sheer volume, playing this incredible repertory, it takes its toll,” Dutton said. (“If you do it right,” Setzer added.) The group tapered its schedule, but was still regularly playing almost 100 performances a year until the pandemic.“The sound, the gravitas, the way they treat each other is so beautiful,” the soprano Barbara Hannigan, an Emerson collaborator, said in an interview. “It’s a model for living, really.”Amy Lombard for The New York TimesThe end of the Emerson Quartet doesn’t mean full retirement for its members, who will maintain a variety of solo performing, arts administration and teaching duties. For more than 20 years the group has been in residence at Stony Brook University, where last Saturday they gave a preview of their magisterial Tully program: Beethoven’s Opus 130, rendingly fragile and vulnerable, and Schubert’s Cello Quintet, in which Finckel poignantly joined.Their final recording, “Infinite Voyage,” with bracing yet seductive works by Schoenberg, Hindemith, Berg and Chausson, was released last month, featuring Hannigan.“We were rehearsing onstage,” she said, recalling her farewell appearance with the group on Oct. 10 in Milan, in Schoenberg’s Second Quartet. “And they were still playing it over slowly, tuning every note, discussing, ‘Is this really the right tempo?’ It was the last rehearsal before a piece they will never play again, and they were still saying: ‘What do you think he meant here?’”“We’re lucky because our very different personalities fit together,” Dutton said. “We respected each other. We knew we were different, but we had one purpose: to make great music. And we achieved that.” More

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      Review: Kate Lindsey Brings Women’s Tales to the Armory

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      Kate Lindsey, accompanied by the pianist Justina Lee, programmed cycles of life, love and creation by Schumann and Fauré.At her recital at the Park Avenue Armory on Monday night, the mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey told the stories of two women, each in her own way an originator.There was Schumann’s “Frauenliebe und -leben,” one of the first song cycles written from a woman’s point of view, a worthwhile artifact of a time when the genre was only a few decades old, and one that persists on concert programs despite its hidebound social mores. And there was “La Chanson d’Ève,” a spare, late-career work from Fauré that excises the first man from the Creation story and wraps its heroine in music of sensual mysticism.For an artist with a daring, theatrical sensibility, it was a retrograde pairing, as though Lindsey were achieving an element of surprise by playing against expectations. Her inventive portrayals at the Metropolitan Opera have included a slick, untrustworthy Nicklausse in Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann” and a wired Nerone bursting with nervous energy in Handel’s “Agrippina.”In the Armory’s Board of Officers Room, though, Lindsey was serene, her voice sheathed in obsidian, as she enlivened women created as companions for men who were nowhere to be found. “I don’t know where Adam is; he’s never mentioned,” she said of the Fauré, to much audience laughter.“Frauenliebe und -leben” is the opposite. The lover is mentioned constantly, everywhere, shaping practically every utterance. The piece sees a woman through the milestones she creates with a man: falling in love, getting married, having a baby, mourning his death. Lindsey tinged the narrator’s first blush of love with russet colors and a penetrating glint. A luscious line wove through “Du Ring an meinem Finger,” an almost sacred intimacy through “Süsser Freund, du blickest.” But the gushiness of “Ich kann’s nicht fassen, nicht glauben” felt forced.The intimate Board of Officers Room can make some vocal instruments sound big and overwhelming, but in Lindsey’s case, it allowed the audience a luxurious communion with her voice that isn’t possible in the Met’s cavernous auditorium. Her timbre, dark and occluded, is at once compelling and withholding; in vulnerable moments, she uses a threadlike straight tone.In the 10 Fauré songs, Lindsey was often enchanting: the profound whispers of “Paradis,” the conversational warmth of “Prima verba,” the gorgeous exaltations of “Comme Dieu rayonne.” The poetry’s endless talk of sighs, sun, flowers and fruits, though, took on a certain sameness; in Lindsey’s interpretation, Eve is more demigod than human. Justina Lee’s piano, at times plodding, made Eden feel earthbound rather than exquisite, the hardiness that made her Schumann comfortingly solid rendered the Fauré stolid.The concert ended with a brief set of Stephen Sondheim songs that introduced an imbalance to the evening. But only a pill could argue against hearing these wonderful pieces. Lindsey’s gentle, honest vibrato was disarming in the most poignant lines of “Losing My Mind,” but she struggled a bit with fitting her operatic technique to “Take Me to the World” and performed an abbreviated, less powerful version of “Being Alive.”The Schumann and Fauré cycles both end with meditations on death, which is where Lindsey summoned her stagecraft. In the long postlude for piano that closes “Frauenliebe,” a motif from the first song emerges as a sad, mournful echo, a memory of happier times. Lindsey’s protagonist, with no words left to sing and no man left to love, seemed to age a lifetime in a moment. There was a sense that now her life, and the person she was to be, would begin.Kate Lindsey and Justina LeePerformed on Monday at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan. More