Was the Emerson the Emerson to the end? “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. 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. It did not take the Emerson long to set the formidable technical standards that we take for granted among chamber musicians today.

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Persons: Emerson, ” Setzer, Drucker, Dutton, Watkins, Schubert, ”, Guarneri, Setzer, George Szell’s, Bernard Holland, Bartok, “ Organizations: Juilliard, New York Times, George Szell’s Cleveland Orchestra, Deutsche Grammophon