Emerson cellist juggles festivals with quartet performances

David Finckel may have to open a hat shop, he wears so many of them.

As if he didn't have enough to do as cellist of the six-time Grammy-winning Emerson String Quartet, he and his wife, pianist Wu Han, will become co-directors of the prestigious Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center next season.

"I promised everybody I wouldn't have to cut back my commitments," he said last week from his New York home before taking care of family matters and hopping a plane for a gig in Puerto Rico. "I don't know where the time comes from, but somehow we manage to find it."

In addition to Lincoln Center, Finckel directs the three-week summer festival, Music@Menlo, teaches and performs at Aspen Music Festival and runs an Internet-based record label, ArtistLed. He and his wife, who have garnered praise for their recordings and performances as a duo, are also bringing up a 12-year-old daughter, Lilian.

On Saturday, it'll be business as usual for Finckel when he provides the low notes for the Emerson. He is the newest member of the quartet, having joined in 1979, just three years after it formed. That longevity may be part of the reasons for the quartet's success, not to mention the freshness it brings to performances by continually alternating first and second violin positions between Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer. Together with violist Lawrence Dutton, they have recorded the complete quartets of Beethoven, Bartok and Shostakovich, and recently finished a Mendelssohn cycle.

Not content to stop with Mendelssohn's quartets, they again broke new ground by recording the Octet by overdubbing four of the parts, but in an unconventional way.

"We recorded four essential components of the music," Finckel said. "It jumped back and forth to make it sound coherent. That had to be marked very carefully in the score - who played what and when. After it was perfected and edited, we went back and recorded the missing music."

To enhance the recording further, they sat in eight different places and played on two sets of instruments.

"We used four old Italian instruments and four made for us in Brooklyn," Finckel says. "It gave eight distinct voices to it."

It's not something they'll try in concert anytime soon, but don't put it past them as a future project.

"It would be tricky, but we could do it."

For the Birmingham concert, they'll play a mere quartet by Mendelssohn, the Op. 44, No. 1, and Bartok's String Quartet No. 2, a work deemed nearly unplayable 40 years ago, but which has become standard repertoire.

"It doesn't sound like new music anymore," Finckel said. "This piece is being assigned as a study piece for young musicians. Young people gravitate toward it. They grasp it quickly."

Scheduled to begin the program is Mozart's Quartet in C major, K. 465 ("Dissonant"), to honor the composer's 250th birthday, but the order may change.

"At Menlo this summer, all the concerts will end with Mozart," he said. "If I had my way, I'd do this concert starting with Mendelssohn, then Bartok and Mozart. Maybe I can talk the guys into it. Hah!"

The concert is sponsored by the Birmingham Music Club. It starts at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Alys Stephens Center. Tickets are $10-$60. Call 975-2787 or go to www.alysstephens.org.

Michael Huebner is fine arts writer and classical music critic for The Birmingham News. mhuebner@bhamnews.com.