Emerson String Quartet - Webern: Works for String Quartet, String Trio Op. 20 (1995)

Opening with the longest single movement Anton Webern ever composed, this collection of his nine works for string quartet and trio covers his entire career. For starters, it bears reminding that the first, longest movement he wrote encompasses a mere nine minutes--glorious minutes, but only nine of them. They make up the 1905 string quartet, taken abundantly through its most sonorous dialogues by the Emerson String Quartet, who provide a lavish setting in Lawrence Dutton's viola for the crucial middle ground between David Finckel's robust cello and the sometimes jarred, sometimes whizzing violins of Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer. Beyond the first string quartet, there are loads of vantages here from which to examine postserial music. For while Webern owed much to Schoenberg's revolution, he owed even more to an inherently economic sense of wholeness. These are miniatures, really, each cutting rapidly to the quick of the matter and finding sometimes abrupt completion. It's perfect music for an era when the tension between experimentation and economy of phrasing urges on creative motion. And here it's perfectly played: tense, sad, sweet, and urgent. -- Andrew Bartlett