Aspen Music Festival (4): Emerson delivers haunting Shostakovich No. 15: Song cycles highlight chamber music program 13.07.2006 (HS)

Could any music be more haunting than the Shostakovich String Quartet No. 15 in E-Flat minor? The way the Emerson Quartet played it Tuesday in Harris Hall, it's hard to imagine anything taking a more direct route to the center of the human soul.

The Russian composer's final quartet, written in 1974 as he grew sicker from cancer, heart disease and other ailments, faces death in a totally personal way. Where Strauss seeks nobility in his "Four Last Songs" and Verdi scares the bejeebers out of his audience with the "Dies irae" in his Requiem, Shostakovich explores the quiet, dark corners of the human soul.

Musically, the piece is relentlessly slow. But the Emerson Quartet found an astonishing range of colors, many of them dark and creepy, in the six movements, all marked "Adagio." Playing much of the opening music with no vibrato, or with white tone, they created a frigid musical environment that still had an eerie beauty. And then a song wells up from David Finckel's cello like tenor song, bringing momentary warmth. And again, the cello combines with Lawrence Dutton's viola for a momentary balm.

The series of individual, overlapping crescendos that opens the second movement, the lapidary violin solo by Philip Setzer in the third, the gentle interweaving of their lines in the fourth, all seemed to come from someplace that had nothing to do with the individual instruments. The jagged rhythms and instrumental effects of the fifth movement funeral march tore at the fabric of the music, creating an overwhelming sense of resignation and, finally, transcendence in the finale.

The first half of the program, comprising Shostakovich's 13th and 14th quartets, didn't have nearly the same impact. They were played well, but without quite the abandon of the 15th.

After the concert, a friend asked, "Did you enjoy that?" For a moment, I had no answer. "Enjoy isn't the word," I said, finally. "But I treasure the experience."

Two unusual song cycles occupied most of Monday's chamber music concert, but not until Louis Ranger, Raymond Mase and Kevin Cobb raised their trumpets to play Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina's Trio for Three Trumpets, which had the advantage over the song cycles of being both short and colorful.

Shostakovich's 1967 "Seven Verses of Alexandre Blok" accompanies each verse with a cello (Joseph Lee), violin (Carole Cowan) or piano (Antoinette Perry) alone or in combination with a soprano (Jennifer Root). The dramatic soprano's line, unfortunately, is a lot less interesting than the instrumental.

Marc-André Dalbavie goes all the way back to medieval music for inspiration, mostly that of French troubadors, for his Sextine Cyclus, sung by the lyric soprano Courtney Huffman and a chamber ensemble conducted by the composer. First time through, each of the songs charm with modal musical language, medieval French and restrained harmonies, and Huffman's silvery voice and pinpoint pitch made it even more likeable. But by the third or fourth verse of each song, with only minimal variation in the accompaniment, impatience started to set in.

Harvey Steiman