George Bernard Shaw had two guidelines governing the writing of fugues. They were, to paraphrase: 1) learn all of the rules and techniques of these complex structures, and 2) don’t. On Thursday, the Emerson String Quartet presented an evening of fugues at Carnegie Hall designed to illuminate “Beethoven in Context.”

Beginning with Bach, the group (Philip Setzer and Eugene Drucker, violins, Lawrence Dutton, viola, and David Finckel, cello) offered six independent pieces from the Art of the Fugue. This unfinished work has no markings to indicate instrumentation, and string quartet versions are commonplace. The Emersonians presented the material straightforwardly, perhaps a bit too dispassionately for modern tastes. A devotee of this type of play could label it as clean, but others, in for a long night of desiccated, forensic exposition, might have just as legitimately dubbed it dull.

The 15th quartet of Dmitri Shostakovich is not a fugal work per se, but does numb the mind a bit with a series of six adagios, each more angst-ridden than the last. This music is meant to be unrelenting, but not necessarily tedious. To pull it off takes a kaleidoscopic palette, but the present foursome could manage only a maddeningly monochromatic reading. This was the best performance of the evening in terms of accuracy, but was the least musical in elemental ways. After a while, the Emerson’s lack of coloration put me in a fugue state.

The primary disappointment of the night, however, was the group’s rendition of the B Flat Major quartet of Beethoven. This 13th work in the genre is arguably the composer’s most expansive, an entire bildungsroman of epic proportions that many classify as the greatest of the great late quartets. It cries out for a zaftig interpretation, a strong sense of gravitas and drama. The Emerson, however, does not play this way, and its resultant rather anemic ensemble sound made this realization seem puny, underweight.

The wan sound was not entirely the group’s fault, as the mounting of string quartets in the main hall at Carnegie is simply a fool’s errand. Much of the original output floats quickly up into the rafters and what the listeners actually hear is already a shadow.

To be sure, there were moments of beauty, particularly in the Cavatina movement — although even here some dynamic contrast would have helped immeasurably — but at times there was a raveling of unity. Mr. Drucker, now in the first “chair” — for reasons known only to the Emerson, the three higher string players stand throughout the performance — had bouts of poor intonation, squeakiness, and rhythmic lapse. He had to scramble to catch his mates at least twice in the Andante con moto.

There are two distinct ways to end this quartet. On fugue night, the Emerson decided to finish with the Grosse Fuge, normally a huge exclamation point on the hero’s life. The first performance of both opus 130 and opus 133 at Carnegie Hall was in 1995 by the Tokyo Quartet, and I’ll wager that its final fugue was a lot more involving than this current iteration — the Emerson’s was harsh at the beginning and wayward at the conclusion. Beethoven’s amazing construction, not modified by either delicate or powerful execution this evening, seemed downright monotonous after so much contextual introduction. I don’t think Shaw would have approved.