Beethoven’s late string quartets are undoubtedly one of the pinnacles of a repertory crowded with mighty summits. Once dismissed as the misjudged productions of a deaf composer, they were later rehabilitated as revolutionary masterpieces – or, as the philosopher Theodor Adorno put it, as a sublime, “fragmented landscape” to rival those of Caspar David Friedrich. With their constant gear-shifts and musical material that forms angular shards rather than lyrical phrases, the late quartets can remain challenging today, nearly 200 years after they were written in the final years of Beethoven’s life.

In the first instalment of the Emerson Quartet’s newest late-quartet cycle, taking in Ops 127, 131 and 135, the works’ challenges were all too apparent. Indeed, there were moments in this concert when, for better or worse, complaints from Beethoven’s contemporaries of rampant discords and incomprehensible musical form suddenly made sense.

To be clear: the visceral feeling of peril, of playing close to the edge, was thrilling at times. There were passages in the second movement of Op 135 that sounded more like Bartók than Ludwig Van, all gritty attack and raw, barely controlled energy. Little could surpass the perfectly coordinated landing in the first bars of Op 127, with which the concert opened: octaves sang, and the extraordinary Emerson blend rang absolutely true. And the final moments of the presto of Op 135 (one of many technical tests in these pieces) were strikingly illuminated through ensemble playing on the bridge, vibrato-free, to produce a truly memorable, refrigerated sound.

But those flashes of the late-Beethovenian sublime were only half the story. The Emersons’ practice of alternating who leads the quartet seemed to cause difficulties in these works, where balance is everything. In Op 127, Eugene Drucker’s first violin lines were often tentative and never took flight; what musical leadership was in evidence came from Lawrence Dutton’s sensitive viola and Paul Watkins’ sweet, gently humorous cello. And for all that the sound was richly melded, too many phrases were rushed or left gasping for air.

Philip Setzer led elsewhere with greater authority. But the concert as a whole was plagued by serious tuning difficulties, above all in the violins. No amount of cello wit could counteract open strings that appeared to hark from an alternative tuning system in Op 131, and no string quartet tone is so sublimely blended as to make up for basic technical problems in individual instrumental lines.

• At St John’s Smith Square, London, on 1 November (box office: 020-7222 1061), and Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, Cardiff, on 2 November (box office: 029-2039 1391).