Ellen Robinson

Staff Writer

To kick off the 29th season of the Wooster Chamber Music Series, the critically acclaimed Emerson String Quartet will be performing at the First Presbyterian Church at 4 p.m. on Sunday.

Tickets are $20 and can be purchased at the Florence O. Wilson Bookstore or at the First Presbyterian Church beginning on the 20th at 3 p.m..

After performing for over three decades together, the Emerson String Quartet won nine Grammies, three Gramophone Awards, the Avery Fisher Prize and the Musical American “Ensemble of the Year” award, along with producing 30 recordings.

The Emerson String Quartet has received praise from numerous sources, including The New York Times, “The performances were everything we have come to expect from this superb ensemble: technically resourceful, musically insightful, cohesive, full of character and always interesting.”

The Boston Globe says, “The Emerson performances represented an extraordinary fusion of experience and authority with audacity and freshness.”

The abundance of talent in the Emerson String Quartet belongs to its four talented musicians. Paul Watkins, the cellist, is the newest, but by no means least-talented member of Emerson. He joined the quartet in May of this year.

At age 20, Watkins was appointed principle cellist to the BBC Symphony Orchestra and performed regularly with all major British Orchestras.

In 2002, Watkins won the Leads Conducting Competition, and in 2009 he became the first Music Director of the English Chamber Orchestra.

The violinist Eugene Drucker won the 1976 Concert Artist Award, and performed solo with orchestras in Montreal, Brussels, Liege and Antwerp. Drucker also recorded the complete unaccompanied works of Bach and the complete sonatas and duos of Bartok.

Violinist Philip Setzer won the 1967 Mayorie Merrieweather Post Competition, and in 1976 he received the Bronze Medal at the Queen Elizabeth International Competition.

Setzer has performed with the Cleveland Orchestra, the National Symphony and Memphis Symphony. He also premiered Paul Epstein’s Manitee Concerto in 1989.

Violist Lawrence Dutton has collaborated with acclaimed artists, including Isaac Stern, Mstislav Rostropovich and Oscar Schumsky, and has recorded three albums with Grammy winning jazz bassist John Patitucci. Dutton received an honorary doctorate from the College of Wooster, and performed solos with orchestras in Germany, Belgium and the United States.

The Emerson String Quartet will be performing three pieces: Britten’s Quartet No. 2, Mendelssohn’s Quartet in F minor Op. 80 and Shostakovich’s Quartet No. 14.

Britten was a modernist composer highly influenced by Mahler, Bartok and Stravinsky. His Quartet No. 2 (composed in 1945) is a tribute to Baroque composer Purcell and is a reshaping of Purcell’s Chaconne (a composition developed by Purcell that is a series of varying sections in slow triple time, typically over a short repeated bass theme).

Mendelssohn’s Quartet in F-minor (composed in 1847) was written in dedication to his sister Fanny who died in the May of that year. The Quartet in F-minor is the last major piece that Mendelssohn wrote before his death two months after completing it.

This piece is said to showcase the emotional change in Mendelssohn after his sister’s death, a rarity for Mendelssohn, who is often described as monotone in the majority of his pieces.

Shostakovich’s Quartet No. 14 was highly influenced by Beethoven, as seen through the two allegretto movements accompanying the adagio. In this quartet Shostakovich highlights the cello in dedication to Sergi Shirinksy, the cellist in the Beethoven Quartet who performed all but his first quartet.

The world class Emerson String Quartet will be giving a performance hard to match later in the Wooster Chamber Music Series and is definitely a must-see.