PERSPECTIVE — With the recent retirements of the Emerson and Orion string quartets and the dissolution of the St. Lawrence String Quartet, a huge opportunity exists for younger ensembles to step up and take their places. And that is exactly what the Escher Quartet is striving to do as it prepares to mark its 20th anniversary in 2025.
In its latest bid to grab attention and stake its claim as one of the world’s top string quartets, the Escher presented all six of Béla Bartók’s string quartets in a single concert in March at New York’s Alice Tully Hall — a performance that lasted 3¼ hours with two intermissions. Its second such presentation is set to take place Aug. 11 at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival.
“Although it’s somewhat of a stretch as far as timing of the program, it’s really a compelling journey for both performer and for listeners,” said cellist Brook Speltz. “This is really a progression of Bartók’s artistic form, his creative voice. To hear all six back to back to back, you clearly see a thread that forms and expands and contrasts and develops.”
The Emerson first completed such a feat in 1981, providing a huge boost to its still-budding profile at the time, and the Escher is hoping for a similar impact. That said, the Escher can already be counted among the world’s top-tier quartets. The ensemble, which brings a big, forceful sound and focused intensity to everything it takes on, is a longtime member of the Chamber Society of Lincoln Center in New York and has performed at top venues and series around the world, from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., to the Hong Kong International Chamber Music Festival (now Beare’s Premiere Music Festival).
The group formed in 2005 at New York’s Manhattan School of Music, where the original members were all students, including the two who remain, first violinist Adam Barnett-Hart and violist Pierre Lapointe. It has undergone several personnel changes since then, but its configuration has remained the same since cellist Brook Speltz joined in 2015 and his brother, Brendan, was named second violinist four years later. “I suppose since the beginning of the quartet, this might be the longest-tenured group that we’ve had,” Brook Speltz said. “Change can be stressful, but I’ve always felt that if a quartet is going to change a member, it has to be a change for the better, whether that’s a stronger player or a stronger fit for the group.”
The Escher, which takes its name from the Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher, got a huge boost right out of the gate. Violinists Pinchas Zukerman and Itzhak Perlman invited it to take part in their respective summer festivals — the Young Artists Program at Ottawa and Ontario’s National Arts Centre on the one hand, and the Perlman Chamber Music Program in Shelter Island, N.Y., on the other. It also helped that the group won an audition in 2007 for a three-season residency for emerging ensembles through what is now known as the Bowers Program at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.
“That’s actually what started our career,” Lapointe said. “You need to have some kind of recognition, and all of us had discussed informally that if nothing happened, the four would go their separate ways.” Prior to that success, the quartet had stumbled at some competitions and hit other roadblocks. The Lincoln Center residency resulted in calls from managers wanting to represent the group and helped position the Escher to be selected in 2010-12 as part of the BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists Scheme in Great Britain.
Young ensembles need to do something to set themselves apart. In its 2013-14 debut on the Naxos record label, the Escher presented a two-volume set of Alexander Zemlinsky’s four almost-unknown quartets. The composer, who was Jewish but later converted to Protestantism, was championed early on by Brahms and was good friends with Arnold Schoenberg. Zemlinsky fled the Nazis in 1933, ultimately settling in New York, where he died in 1942 and was largely forgotten.
Conductor James Conlon has been a fervent champion of Zemlinsky and other composers who were suppressed by the Nazis. As music director of the Ravinia Festival at the time, he urged the Escher to play several of the Zemlinsky quartets as part of its two-concert 2007 debut at the summer series in Highland Park, Ill., a northern suburb of Chicago. The group didn’t know the works, which Speltz described as “lush, sometimes very dramatic and searing, but always with lyrical romanticism,” and was immediately impressed by what they discovered. Because only the LaSalle Quartet had recorded the four works previously, the Escher was able to make the music its own without worrying about being compared to multiple performances from the past. It went on to perform the complete Zemlinsky cycle at Music@Menlo, a festival in Atherton, Calif., and under the auspices of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.
“In a way, that paved the path for us doing the cycle of Bartók,” Lapointe said. The Escher went on to record the complete quartets by Mendelssohn on the BIS label, as well as works in the quartet genre by American composers Charles Ives and Samuel Barber.
Unlike the Emerson, whose two violinists took turns in the first seat, the Escher sticks to the more traditional model of a strong, fixed first violinist. While Speltz believes quartets have to be a “democracy” with every member having a voice in musical decisions, he sees the first violin as an essential anchor. “There is just so much of the melody,” he said, “and not just the melody but the musical impulse and direction that comes from that chair. There has to be strong leadership, and without that, I find performances can be less convincing and less unified.”
Asked to describe the Escher’s distinctive sound, Speltz pointed to its emphasis on giving voice to the individuality of its four members: “I think a lot of groups will tend, in a way, to homogenize their sounds, to stack on top of each other in a very unified way, and that can absolutely be effective, but we want to not lose these individual voices of each member.” Lapointe added that the group stresses the importance of good technique. “We don’t take shortcuts,” he said. “We try not to let anything go. We really polish the beginning of a piece, because by then, when you develop that sense of attention, it carries on.”
The Escher has played Bartók from the first year of its existence, but it did not perform all six of the composer’s quartets until 2021, when it presented them over two nights in a small church as part of the Bravo! Vail Music Festival in Colorado. “It was actually quite a way to return to the stage after the pandemic,” Speltz said. “It was exhausting but exhilarating.” The success of that outing gave the group the confidence to propose performing the set under the auspices of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln, the concert that took place in March.
Bartók’s quartets, which date from 1909 through 1939, rank among the greatest such sets alongside those of Beethoven and Shostakovich. Lapointe sees them as a “snapshot” of the evolution of music during the early 20th century. When it performs all of the Bartók quartets in one sitting, the Escher does them chronologically. The first two works, which rest solidly in post-Romantic style, are the longest and most physically demanding. Everything shifts beginning with the String Quartet No. 3 (1927). “Now, we are fully into Bartók the ethnomusicologist, the collector of folk music — dance-like themes, jagged rhythms, and irregular harmonies,” Speltz said.
Lapointe uses words like “marathon” and “epic” to describe the six-quartet experience, which is closer to the length of many operas. “It’s not something you would do everyday,” said Speltz, “and as a listener, it’s probably not something you could absorb on a daily basis, but there is room for it in the mind and in the heart, and in the spirit of listening and experiencing music.”
