The Emerson String Quartet Plays at Caramoor The Emerson String Quartet This ensemble, featuring, from left, Eugene Drucker, Philip Setzer, Paul Watkins and Lawrence Dutton, playing at the Venetian Theater at the Caramoor Festival in Katonah, N.Y. KATONAH, N.Y. - The Emerson String Quartet has already played concerts with its new cellist, Paul Watkins, in Canada, China and Taiwan. But for its first full program with its new member in America, the ensemble chose a casual location: the inviting, open-air Venetian Theater here at the Caramoor Festival on Sunday afternoon. Given the popularity and influence of the Emerson Quartet, the chamber music world will be anxious to hear how Mr. Watkins fits in. He replaces David Finckel, who chose to leave. This is the ensemble's only change of personnel since 1979. Offering Britten's great String Quartet No. 3 and two of Beethoven's "Razumovsky" Quartets, the ensemble played with its characteristic blend of cohesion and spontaneity. Mr. Watkins, 43, seemed palpably comfortable and charmingly eager. His playing was elegant, crisp and colorful. From this first impression, his sound seemed not as full-bodied and penetrating as Mr. Finckel's. You were drawn in, though, by the character and imagination of his work. The Emerson began at Juilliard as a student ensemble that turned professional in 1976. Three years later Mr. Finckel became the cellist, joining the violinists Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer, and the violist Lawrence Dutton. For years the Emerson thought that should one member decide to move on, it would disband. But when Mr. Finckel told his colleagues two years ago that he wanted to focus on his other activities (including being co-director of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center), they decided to keep going if they could find the right cellist. Mr. Watkins, who has a notable career as a concerto soloist and chamber music player, is also a conductor (currently the music director of the English Chamber Orchestra). That he is so busy was actually a selling point. In the last decade or so the Emerson had been playing about 85 to 90 concerts a season. Mr. Watkins asked about cutting back to 65 or so, as Mr. Drucker told me in a phone conversation in January. The reduced schedule suited the other players, who also pursue individual activities. Mr. Watkins brings a generational jolt and, perhaps, a fresh perspective to the Emerson, whose others players, all Americans, are nearly 60 or just past it. Playing the Britten quartet was a tribute to that composer on the 100th anniversary of his birth, but also a nod, it would seem, to Mr. Watkins, who is British. Written in 1976, the Britten quartet was first performed by the Amadeus Quartet in England in December of that year, just 15 days after the composer's death at 63. Britten had been struggling with heart problems and this quartet can be heard as a valedictory to life. The work is structured in five movements. In the first episodic movement the players trade intense and quizzical duets. The work concludes with a Recitative and Passacaglia marked "La serenissima" ("The Most Serene"), a name the Venetian Republic applied to itself over the centuries. Even though the musical language hews mostly to tonality, the quartet came across in this gripping, sinewy and, in the final passacaglia, elegiac performance as a stunning modernist score. The Emerson gave a charged yet nuanced account of Beethoven's Quartet No. 8 in E minor (Op. 59, No. Though the terrible spell of humid, hot weather broke on Sunday afternoon, it was still a sticky day and occasional intonation problems in the playing were understandable. After intermission, in Beethoven's Quartet No. 9 in C (Op. 59, No. 3), these superb musicians, seemingly undaunted by the weather, were consistently brilliant. In the breathless Allegro finale, with its rush of superfast spiraling runs, the Emerson deftly dispatched the technical challenges while playing with impish humor. As the new season begins, the Emerson Quartet is off to a dynamic restart. The Emerson String Quartet will play the Mostly Mozart Festival at Alice Tully Hall on Aug. 19; (212) 721-6500, mostlymozart.org.