Comp.string Quartets: Emerson Sq

This disc received the 2000 Gramophone magazine award for "Best
Chamber Recording." It also received a Grammy Award for "Best Classical Album" and "Best Chamber Music Performance."
The 15 string quartets of Dmitri Shostakovich represent one of the towering legacies of 20th-century music, yet it has taken some time for them to be accepted as central repertoire by non-Russian ensembles, especially the elite groups of the west. Now the Emerson String Quartet, unquestionably one of the finest and most highly visible before the public, make major redress in the form of a complete cycle which has a strikingly individual profile and in some ways places these works in a new light.
Their overall approach is familiar: generally fleet and propulsively driven, never lingering to over-emphasize detail or make a meal of a mood, while impressing mightily with razor-edge precision and uncanny intonation. It might be said that their Shostakovich sounds reconstructed, rid of the extra-musical associations with which it is sometimes burdened, treated as music per se rather than a "roman clef" of cold war anguish. And, perhaps not surprisingly, the approach pays ample dividends, with the results for the most part stimulating and refreshing, reminding us that this great music is more than just powerful rhetoric.
REVIEWS:
American Record Guide (5-6/00, pp.189-98) - "...In the case of the Second Quartet...[t]he Emerson makes of the final measures of music an awe-inspiring chorale..."