The Emerson String Quartet embarks on a final coda — and leaves behind an enduring legacy

A final cadence. The chord lingers. A brief silence.

Then, a shout.

“Well done!” one man emphatically hollered from a balcony loge at Koerner Hall. It wasn’t yet the end of the piece, but after the way the inimitable Emerson String Quartet played the first movement of Johannes Brahms’s “String Quartet No. 3,” rendering the folk-like hunting calls with a buoyant joie de vivre and filling the auditorium with radiant bursts of energy, who could blame him?

The audience chortled in approval at the mid-piece balcony interjection, before violinist Philip Setzer turned to face the audience and responded humorously: “I hope you are the critic.”

The man on the balcony may not be a critic, but he certainly vocalized what was running in this reviewer’s head.

The Emerson String Quartet’s concert at the Royal Conservatory of Music’s Koerner Hall on Sunday evening was a richly rewarding final coda for a group which has, time and again, proved why it is one of the world’s greatest chamber ensembles.

After more than four decades together, the quartet is disbanding at the end of the 2022-23 season, following a farewell tour across Europe and North America, and culminating with a filmed performance in New York City next October.

It’s difficult to overstate the group’s achievements. They have released more than 30 recordings and been feted with numerous awards, including nine Grammys, three Gramophone Awards and the prestigious Avery Fisher Prize.

But the quartet’s greatest accomplishment has nothing to do with the albums nor the awards, as significant as they may be. The enduring legacy of any individual or group, artistic or otherwise, is what they leave for the generations that come after them. And in that respect, the Emerson String Quartet has more than succeeded.

That was on clear display Sunday evening. Scores of young musicians, many with violins and violas strapped across their shoulders, filed into the auditorium with their faces beaming at the prospect of witnessing this historic performance.

The Emerson String Quartet came together in 1976, long before this new generation of instrumentalists, in their late teens and early 20-somethings, were born. Heck, it’s possible the quartet formed even before some of these students’ parents were born. But the way the ensemble has inspired emerging musicians, such as those in the audience Sunday, is perhaps their greatest gift and a mark of their legacy for the decades to come.

The Emerson String Quartet is, for so many students, an aspiration. They themselves started as a group of student musicians in Julliard before catapulting to chamber music super-stardom, proving that with grit and dedication, the distant dreams of young musicians can, in fact, come true.

It was in high school music class when I first heard the Emerson Quartet. We were in our string ensembles, largely quartets and quintets, and the teacher played one of their numerous recordings on the rehearsal room speaker system. Close your eyes and listen, he told us. Hearing the ensemble deliver the notes on the page with such dynamism, how they didn’t just produce sound but evoked such a range of emotions through music, was inspiring.

I was reminded of that Sunday as I closed my eyes and listened to them live for the first and, likely, final time. The program — beginning with Felix Mendelssohn’s “String Quartet No. 1,” followed by the Brahms quartet and ending with Antonin Dvořák’s “String Quartet No. 14” — elegantly showcased the quartet’s brilliance.

Violinists Setzer and Eugene Drucker, the original members of the group, perfectly blended and balanced each other, gracefully trading the melodies and themes in both the Mendelssohn and Dvořák quartets. Lawrence Dutton pulled rich and dark melodic lines from his viola in the Brahms quartet, floating gracefully over the other muted instruments. And on cello, Paul Watkins added a strong foundation, with a mellow counterpoint gently rising above the upper strings in the final piece of the program.

After a sustained ovation, the quartet returned for an encore: Dvořák’s “I Wander Often Past Yonder House,” one of his 12 “Cypresses” for string quartet. Wistful, with a gentle lilt, the short piece capped off an evening to remember.

Well done, indeed.

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