Much the finest experience comes in Schoenberg’s quartet, where the Emerson Quartet ’s playing masterfully combines forensic technical precision and expressive warmth. And Hannigan’s identif ication with Schoenberg’s extraordinary and exploratory music is complete and memorable.

The Emersons come to [the Schoenberg] as if it were new, hot from the press, and in doing so they recreate the sense of inordinate extravagance that made early audiences so uneasy.

Each of these works is in some sense challenging; musically, psychologically, or both. But there’s surely nobody better-placed than Barbara Hannigan to explore those darker musical corners, and her musical collaborators are second to none. For the Emersons, it not only looks back to their track-record of championing adventurous repertoire, but perhaps also echoes on a more personal level the bittersweetness of bidding farewell.

Their final recording, “Infinite Voyage,” with bracing yet seductive works by Schoenberg, Hindemith, Berg and Chausson, was released last month, featuring Hannigan.

This weekend, the quartet will play its last concerts ever, at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. The group, which formed in 1976, has recorded more than forty albums, including all sixteen Beethoven quartets. (Its swan song, “Infinite Voyage,” came out in September.) In a field accustomed to half-full auditoriums, their concerts sell out. It’s like when One Direction broke up—except that One Direction never won a Grammy, and the Emersons have nine.