The cameras had been rolling lengthy earlier than the Emerson String Quartet performed a be aware behind the Tiny Desk. A documentary movie crew adopted the band into our foyer and saved rolling tape because the gamers unpacked their devices, sat all the way down to heat up and joked ceaselessly amongst themselves.

The explanation for all of the fuss was to mark the ultimate days of the practically 50-year profession of certainly one of fashionable historical past’s most sturdy, beloved and prolific chamber ensembles. Simply two days after we captured this efficiency, the band performed its closing live performance collectively in New York, the place all of it started in 1976 when a pair Juilliard college students thought placing collectively a string quartet is perhaps a enjoyable concept. Forty-some albums, 9 Grammys and numerous live shows later, we had been honored to doc one of many band’s final performances.

Typical for the Emersons, the music they selected was wide-ranging. A touch of Haydn served as a witty amuse-bouche, then on to a mini-movement from late in Beethoven‘s profession, when the composer may swing his moods with shockingly fashionable abandon. On the coronary heart of this bittersweet live performance is the Emersons’ achingly lovely efficiency of George Walker‘s Lyric for Strings. The Washington, D.C. native, in 1996, grew to become the primary Black composer to win a Pulitzer. The elegiac music poured out of the gamers in wealthy, intermingling layers.

However the band could not go away on a somber be aware, so it closed with a rambunctious interpretation of the finale to Ravel‘s string quartet — an appropriately effervescent strategy to say goodbye.

SET LIST

• Haydn: String Quartet, Op 33, No. 5: Scherzo
• Beethoven: String Quartet, Op. 130: Presto
• Walker: Lyric for Strings
• Ravel: String Quartet in F: Finale

MUSICIANS

• Eugene Drucker: violin
• Philip Setzer: violin
• Lawrence Dutton: viola
• Paul Watkins: cello

TINY DESK TEAM

• Producer: Tom Huizenga 
• Director/Editor: Kara Body
• Audio Engineer: Josh Rogosin
• Videographers: Kara Body, Michael Zamora
• Sequence Producer: Bobby Carter 
• Audio Assistant: Hannah Gluvna
• Manufacturing Assistant: Ashley Pointer
• Photographer: Catie Boring
• Tiny Desk Crew: Suraya Mohamed, Maia Stern, Joshua Bryant, Hazel Cills
• Sequence Creators: Bob Boilen, Stephen Thompson
• VP, Visuals and Music: Keith Jenkins
• Senior VP, Programming: Anya Grundmann