wolf trap

Hill has been performing solo at music festivals over the past year and is scheduled to play Wolf Trap in Vienna, Va., and Ravinia Festival north of Chicago in June and the Promiseland Festival in Australia in October.

Edward Walters, a versatile woodwind player who spent decades as musical contractor — the person who formed the bands — at the National Theatre and Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts, died March 11 at a skilled-nursing center in Rockville, Md. He was 77.

Since then, the orchestra has barely made it farther from the Kennedy Center than Wolf Trap.

What, then, is the value-add in a review of the group’s concert at the Barns at Wolf Trap, playing Beethoven quartets that most classical music lovers have heard umpteen times on the radio or in person?

And although I can’t significantly veer from the arc of praise the Emerson has earned over the years, I detected at the Wolf Trap concert what my predecessor Anne Midgette picked up on in 2015: frequent issues with intonation, and a “gluey” quality here and there when the goings got tough.