Next month, after more than four decades as one of the world’s leading string quartets, the Emerson Quartet will give their final concerts. Their last disc before they go their separate ways is built around one of the cornerstones of the 20th-century quartet repertoire, a work they had never recorded before. Schoenberg’s Second Quartet is remarkable not only for including settings for soprano of poems by Stefan George in its final two movements, but also as the piece in which he took his first tentative steps into the unknown world of atonality, even though in its closing bars the music returns to the safety of F sharp major.
