THERE was a valedictory feel in the air on Saturday morning at the Queen's Hall.
Obviously, it was the final Queen's Hall concert on the last day of this year's Edinburgh International Festival. But it was more than that. The performers at the closing concert of the series were the players of Emerson String Quartet. And that is where the valedictory note sounded. The group had placed a message in the programme booklet, announcing that Saturday's concert would be the last time that Emerson cellist of more than 30 years, David Finckel, would play with the great American string quartet, and that his successor, next year, will be the outstanding British cellist Paul Watkins. No explanation was offered, though I understand Finckel will pursue other chamber music interests.
So it was appropriate that they opened this programme with a polished account of Mozart's D major Quartet K575 which featured, in its sublime second movement, some glorious moments for the cello to shine, and in Mozart's most democratically written finale where both lower instruments, viola and cello, feature prominently together.
I'm not a fan of the music of Thomas Ades, but his four-movement piece, entitled The Four Quarters, premiered by the Emersons last year in New York, is tremendously effective in its weather evocations and in its second movement where its insistent pizzicato passages turn into a dance.
Fittingly, the group rounded off the Queen's Hall series, and Finckel's distinguished career as an Emerson, with a comprehensively majestic performance of Beethoven's opus 127 Quartet in E flat, where the hall resounded with the massive sonority of the chords that launch the piece.
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