AFTER PERFORMING TOGETHER for more than 25 years, the Emmy award-winning Emerson String Quartet still have the passion, commitment and sense of humour that give them, in the words of The New York Times, 'a humanity and a skill that cannot be explained ... a splendid adventure to which we owe these players our thanks'. America's best-known quartet - comprising violinists Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer, violist Lawrence Dutton and cellist David Finckel - have been playing together since graduating from New York's Juilliard School. Because their inaugural year was 1976, the US Bicentennial, they wanted an American literary name. Other quartets had already taken 'Walden', after the Henry David Thoreau classic, and 'Concord', Thoreau's home town, where the American revolutionary war began. So, they chose poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, which they felt was euphonious. Three of the players' fathers performed in string quartets, so the standard repertoire was relatively easy. Having studied with Oscar Shumsky and other Juilliard teachers, their technique is astonishing. Now all in their 40s, they're aware of the difference in generations, and between American and European music, but try to bridge the gaps. Next Sunday, they'll perform in Hong Kong, at City Hall. The Emerson also commission and play modern works, from contemporary American composers Bright Sheng, Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, Walter Piston and Ned Rorem. 'We simply tell them to write,' says violinist Drucker. 'When we get the manuscript, it's a great surprise.' Although playing as a string quartet, the musicians feel their different personalities, and even physical types, should be emphasised. This individuality may not always be obvious in concert, but, like Canadian composer and musician Glenn Gould, they're fascinated with recording techniques to make the different sounds clearer. Drucker, sitting in his Upper West Side apartment, says: 'I tell young quartet players, after they get through the first few years, 'Do not stereotype yourselves.' There are bound to be differences in personalities. We never try to homogenise each other. We value the individual contributions, both in terms of personality and actual sound texture,' he says. 'Hearing every single line is an objective of ours. We don't try to neutralise ourselves. No rules. We let each one do whatever the other wants to do.' They're also socially conscious, frequently performing benefits for community organisations and schools. Just a few days after the bombing of the World Trade Centre in 2001, they gave a concert in New York, including Beethoven's Opus 131 (what Richard Wagner called 'the saddest music ever written'), Samuel Barber's Adagio and a Bartok quartet. They also have broken the mould by performing and recording composers' complete works. They see these projects as a way of tracking personal evolution, as with Beethoven, or as a diary of political, emotional and artistic torment, as with Dmitri Shostakovich. Three composers well associated with the Emerson String Quartet - Haydn, Beethoven and Shostakovich - will make up the programme for their concert next Sunday at City Hall. The opening work is Haydn's The Lark Quartet, part of what they call their Haydn Project, which may include recording all of the composer's quartets over the next 25 years or so. Then comes a middle Beethoven quartet, Opus 59 #2. Their recording of the complete Beethoven quartets in 1997 earned the quartet their fourth Emmy, for best chamber music. Finckel says the Beethoven quartets are 'mystical, with so many things where you have to sit around trying to use your imagination to figure out what he was hearing, internally'. Recording and performing Beethoven, though, are different matters. The last movement of one quartet is played with such breakneck speed - and yet such clarity - that nobody is able to duplicate it. Drucker, who alternates the first violin chair with Setzer, laughs off the observation. 'Part of that is due to the recording technique. Yes, we played it very fast, but to get that clarity, we did some patching. In live performances, we have to slow it down a bit.' That clarity is nowhere better shown than in their recordings of the complete quartets by Shostakovich, from which they will play the Eighth Quartet. That landmark recording came from three summers at the Aspen Music Festival, where they played five quartets each year. They used these live performance - with some minor changes, and editing out audience sounds - for a set that won them best classical album and best chamber music recording and Gramophone's prize as the year's best chamber music recording. Hong Kong audiences have a soft spot for Shostakovich's dramatic, politically charged works, in part because his son, Maxim, was the Hong Kong Philharmonic's principal guest conductor in the 1980s. Drucker says Shostakovich's Eighth Quartet will have a jolting effect, then begins to describe the music less in artistic terms than those of a cryptologist-historian. 'With Shostakovich, one must listen through many layers. If music sounds happy, you must question whether it is irony, for this was a man who constantly was at odds with the Soviet Union. And when he wrote this quartet, he had visited Dresden [in Germany], where he was horrified by the second world war, which had ended just 12 years before,' says Drucker. 'He dedicated it to 'the victims of fascism and war', which was acceptable to Stalin. And because he quoted a Jewish song of another composition, he was permitted. Jews weren't liked, but he had free rein to champion the Jews when speaking of the Nazis. So, in the second movement, you hear this Jewish theme screaming in the violins. 'But there was something deeper. The quartet opens with a four-note theme which was used to spell out his own name, as well as quoting his own earlier works. This was dangerously self-referential. The composer was supposed to serve the masses and not himself. When you realise these things, you see his empathy with the Jews was emblematic with the horrors of the Soviet Union,' says Drucker. 'There is even more. In the beginning of the fourth movement, three repeated notes are heard in the lower instruments, while the violin holds on to one note. Some people say that is the knock on the door by the Soviet secret police. Others say that the knock was a knock on the table in the cafes, when informers were about ... But these things don't have to be known to appreciate the visceral impact. It was genius which produced it, and the political oppression added to the gravity. Without genius, it wouldn't have worked.' The Emerson have another connection with Shostakovich that leads to an entirely different dimension in their playing. Some years ago, the avant-garde Theatre de Complicite worked with the quartet in a psychodrama of the life of Shostakovich. For this, the quartet didn't simply sit down and play the composer's 15th Quartet. They stood, danced, pranced, lay down and worked in counterpoint to some of the rarest archives of Shostakovich and other Russians of the Stalinist era. The result was amazing theatre - and a new step that may be necessary for any string quartet. Classical music is difficult enough these days, with pop culture and its tentacles in every field. (Drucker's 10-year-old son balances a liking for opera with a love for Justin Timberlake.) So, after the Shostakovich theatre-piece, the Emerson worked with renowned scientist Brian Green in trying to reproduce certain post-theory of relativity concepts with post-1905 music, ending with concepts such as the superstring theory. It was a good match. 'That was a lecture with musical examples,' says Drucker. 'But another theatre piece may be in the offing, with physics, lights, music. Mind you, we don't do this for the purpose of attracting new audiences, but we flow naturally with our own interests.' Drucker says attracting young audiences is easier for the Kronos Quartet, which play virtually everything from Jimi Hendrix to Webern and Sudanese music. 'But we don't do that,' says Drucker. 'Each group has to find its own level. Our way of presenting things and materials seems to have struck audiences which are already established. And people who think we have an elitist form and won't go the distance ... well, that's life.' Drucker attributes the quartet's longevity to three factors. First, a recognition of their differences as people and musicians. Second, a sense of humour, no matter what the situation. And finally, Drucker says, 'on the road, we practise by ourselves and don't want to hear the others. We can work separately and feel comfortable. And when we work together, the challenge is to goad each other on for the clearest sounds and the most distinctive textures.' Emerson String Quartet, Jun 27, 8pm, City Hall Concert Hall, $100, $160, $220 Urbtix