By David Patrick Stearns

Upon first rising to international prominence, the Emerson String Quartet couldn't help seeming like the musical equivalent of the Young Republicans. The Kronos Quartet, its almost exact contemporary, was well under way with its modernization of the string quartet both in concert and on recordings. In comparison, the Emerson's repertory pretty much stopped where Kronos's began, with Bartók. But while not disputing the achievements of the Kronos Quartet, the Emerson-for all its more traditional programs and album covers-has no less of a claim to being the defining American quartet of its generation, more in its style of performance than in its repertory (or taste in haircuts).

Unlike quartets that strive for the effect of one mind playing four instruments, the Emerson brand of music making suggests a hearty group of individualists who opted for musical synchronization while still retaining their personalities. To this end, the ensemble's violinists, Philip Setzer and Eugene Drucker, trade off between first and second chair so that neither takes a back seat to the other. It's been this way since 1976, the year of the Bicentennial, when the fledgling group named itself for the quintessential American idealist, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Blessed by the same personnel since 1979, the Emerson Quartet has maintained its initial conceptual approach with ever-increasing precision and often astounding physical vigor.

The Quartet's hallmark-as illustrated by the twin pillars of its repertory, Beethoven and Bartók-is in executing the score with a combination of startling intellectual comprehension and sheer musculature, avoiding the prevalent post-modernist tendency to dissect masterpieces to death. The Juilliard String Quartet is often cited as the Emerson's most obvious antecedent, and there are definite conceptual similarities between the two groups' performances of the latter composers. Having initially made its name by playing all six Bartók quartets in a single evening (three times in New York City alone), the Emerson evolved a style of playing that had all the Juilliard's rhythmic vigor but with an even greater coloristic intensification.

Any broad description of such a multi-faceted group, however, can't help emphasizing one characteristic at the expense of another, and there's room for everything in an Emerson interpretation. In its Beethoven recordings, the Emerson's often-thrilling attempts to adhere to the composer's speedy metronome markings never shortchange the music's more expansive emotional element. That sense of balance prompts a less romantic, more structural approach in the Quartet's recording of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings than the Kronos Quartet (how's that for a reversal of image?), though nobody can accuse the Emerson of being unduly chilly or cerebral. In Schubert's sublime Quintet in C major, where emotionalism is absolutely required, the prayerful Adagio has rarely received more spontaneous, radiant treatment than in the hands of the Emerson Quartet.

Such a wide interpretive range is possible because of the range of personalities in the group. For instance, cellist David Finkel's Rostropovich-like emotional extravagance in his solo recordings with pianist-wife Wu Han (which they record and release on their own label) is quite different than his interaction with the Quartet. The other three are more recognizable products of The Juilliard School, learning their craft from teachers with highly defined personalities. Violist Lawrence Dutton studied there with Lillian Fuchs, violinist Setzer (the son of two Cleveland Orchestra violinists) with Oscar Shumsky and, in Cleveland, Josef Gingold, and violinist Drucker (whose father played in the famous Busch Quartet) with Shumsky and, at Tanglewood, Joseph Silverstein. Clearly, the Emerson not only descends from the Juilliard Quartet but has also partaken of the rich European tradition that the leaner-sounding Juilliard was said to reject.

Given its highly individualistic interpretive approach, the Emerson's most distinctive interpretations start after Beethoven's Opus 18 set, which, historically speaking, is when string quartet composition began to develop increased independence of each musical line. The four players throw themselves fearlessly into Beethoven's virtually unplayable Grosse Fuge, exhilaratingly tapping into the piece's elemental power without the faintest hope of maintaining composure. No texture is too dense for revelatory clarification by this musical truth squad, whether in Beethoven, Prokofiev, Bartók, or, most remarkably, in the two Ives quartets. Ives's Second Quartet, in particular, emerges like a huge Grandma Moses painting, rustic in style but full of depth and details that reveal the composer's many unusual effects to be far more than novelty.

In many ways, the Emerson Quartet is ideal for modern music. The players choose their repertory carefully, presenting new works from a number of different schools with all of the scrupulous polish given to Beethoven. The results are unusually good, as illustrated by last year's pairing of two vastly different additions to the string-quartet repertory on record: Ned Rorem's Quartet No. 4, which gives these great musical traffic managers much to do, and Edgar Meyer's mellifluous, minimalist-influenced Quintet, which doesn't (but is just as fine a piece). Last year at Carnegie Hall, the Quartet gave the premiere of Ellen Taaffe Zwilich's Quartet No. 2, a good piece that doesn't stray too far from territory charted by Bartók.

One waits impatiently for Elliott Carter's supremely demanding string quartets to get the Emerson treatment. Judging from how much the members admire Carter, it shouldn't be long. Then again, considering how tirelessly they prepare everything, we might be kept waiting indeed. It's not for nothing that the Emerson Quartet has won four Grammys-two for the Bartók cycle in 1990, including Best Classical Recording of the Year, and one each for the Barber/Ives in 1994 and the Beethoven cycle in 1997-as well as numerous other citations.

For the moment, though, the ensemble is deeply immersed in Shostakovich, whose 15 quartets it has recorded in the Aspen Music Festival's superb Harris Hall for Deutsche Grammophon and will perform in concert cycles in New York and London this year. In ways less technical than emotional, this may prove to be the biggest challenge of the Emerson foursome's musical life. On the page, the quartets can read strangely, often seeming to begin in the middle of a trivial musical thought, with extended solo soliloquies in which meaning can seem just out of reach. The first performers-notably the Beethoven and Borodin String Quartets-understood the music intuitively, having the same collective experience amid the terror and repression of Soviet Russia as the composer, and their recordings are considered invaluable.

Always ones to find their own way into a given piece, the Emerson players aren't about to copy those early recordings. Decades later, far removed in relatively clean, well-lit America, they must come up with their own subtext in ways that no other area of their repertory has demanded. It's a measure of the Emerson String Quartet's stature at nearly a quarter century that we look forward to its discoveries with great interest.

David Patrick Stearns is classical-music and theater critic of USA Today, monthly columnist of BBC Music Magazine, and contributor to Opera News and Stereophile, among others.