Emerson String Quartet

Mozart – String Quartet in D minor K 421
Shostakovich – String Quartet No 4 in D major Op 832
Beethoven – String Quartet in E flat major Op 127

The American-based Emerson String Quartet, long acknowledged as masters of the art of quartet playing, return to Bath with an enticing programme. Mozart’s D minor Quartet, a work with episodes of passionate urgency, precedes Shostakovich’s Fourth Quartet, withheld for some years by the composer because of its politically inopportune allusions to Jewish folk music. And the evening ends with Beethoven’s Op 127, the most traditionally shaped of his late quartets, but no less eloquent or thrilling for that.