We were delighted to welcome the acclaimed Pacifica Quartet for their third concert for Friends on Tuesday, April 1, 2025. And the programme for this concert was no April Fools joke, but rather a fascinating range of great music from 1928, 1936, and the final work from 1944. A meaty programme suits this group, violinists Simin Ganatra and Austin Harman, violist Mark Holloway, and cellist Brandon Vamos, who have collectively been for some years quartet-in-residence at the venerable Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. As it happens, their time teaching at that renowned post-secondary music conservatory overlapped with another master of chamber music and longtime friend of our audiences, pianist Menahem Pressler, founder and leader (for more than 50 years) of the Beaux Arts Trio – who played more concerts for us than any other musician over the 77 seasons of our series.
So how was this Pacifica Quartet concert different from the usual fare we offer our patrons? Most Friends concerts include a Classical piece, a Modern work, and something from the Romantic period to bring a diversity of sounds and styles to each performance, offering our audience a chance to hear the musicians’ artistry and range. (Admittedly, we have varied from that routine on other occasions; the Pavel Haas Quartet concert last month included two Modern works and a Romantic piece, all by Czech composers.) This time, in collaboration with the musicians, we selected an evening programme of three works from the first half of the 20th Century that offer a range of musical styles and emotional colours.
Samuel Barber’s String Quartet in B Minor, Opus 11, was last performed in full for Friends at a concert in 2004. Of course, the quartet includes the famous Adagio, later orchestrated by Barber at Toscanini’s suggestion as his Adagio for Strings. And the Adagio portion of the string quartet has been played for us at more recent concerts, but not within the context of the complete piece. The music of this work is full of vigour and occasional swift changes of mood and tone. Written when the composer was 26 (in 1936), the melodies, harmonies, surprising dissonances and shifting rhythms have aged very well. While the Adagio is justly famous, the Pacifica’s performance gave us a strong case for hearing the whole work more often. After the concert, one of the musicians mentioned that they plan to record the Barber String Quartet for release possibly next year. The passion of this rendition brought some audience members to their feet – after only the first work of the evening.
After this apéritif, the whole audience was ready for Béla Bartók’s String Quartet No. 4 in C Major, composed in 1928. This is acknowledged as being one of the great masterworks of the string quartet repertoire, along with the other five quartets that make up the Bartók cycle. While we last heard No. 4 in spring 2016 played by the Emerson String Quartet, some will remember the whole cycle played in two successive concerts for Friends by the Bartók Quartet in February 1996. The Fourth Quartet is densely packed, tense music. The Pacifica Quartet brought the music a more lyrical and softer tone in the first movement than is usually heard at the start of this tightly wound piece. Rather than starting with high intensity, jagged phrases, and across the five movements in this performance we felt the tension and angularity increase in gradual stages. That said, the “night music” of the second movement had a pleasing darkness of tone as well as some sheen in the highlights. And the pizzicato fourth movement gave us the rustic folk and yet off-kilter tautness that it needs, leading into a fearsome finale that had the bite and sheen, while maintaining balance, that had been eschewed for the opening. Again, the energy from the musicians was palpable. And it led to a standing ovation and scattered bravos in time for the interval.
We learned afterwards that the Pacifica will be participating in a Bartók Symposium this weekend, and part of that participation will include them again performing this Fourth Quartet.
After the intermission, the Pacifica gave us a powerful third act with Dmitri Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 2 in A Major, Opus 68, composed during 1944 and World War II. This music has energy, short and long lines of melody, moments of slowness, almost stillness, and represents powerful emotions, in ways related to its historical context. There are Jewish music inflections heard in this string quartet, and it is generally accepted that Shostakovich could empathise with people facing persecution at this time for political reasons external and internal to the Soviet Union. For that, and other reasons, this music was not performed widely until years after it was written. On this occasion, the musicians’ performance packed an emotional punch devoid of sentimentality. The tone could be fierce, keening, or poignant, especially first violinist Simin Ganatra’s delicate yet powerful lead lines during the Recitative and Romance: Adagio (second movement), without being at all cloying. The Pacifica Quartet’s recording of the complete Shostakovich cycle of 15 quartets (also including quartets by his contemporaries) have been justly celebrated, and we heard some of that quality here. And as it happens, this is the first time that we have heard the Second Quartet since the Pacifica Quartet played it for us in 2018. And while nobody plays this repertoire quite like the Borodin Quartet (who played the Shostakovich quartet cycle for us in May 2015), the beauty and persuasiveness of this evening’s music-making was enough to again bring our enthusiastic (and knowledgeable) audience to its collective feet with cheers to end the evening.
After the concert, several long-time subscribers and supporters commented that they had enjoyed the musicians’ powerful performance of this selection of Modern masterpieces far more than they had anticipated when they arrived. And they suggested that we consider doing this sort of Modern but diverse program again, possibly more often.
Please join us for a slightly more ‘traditional’ programme played by the thoroughly modern Isidore Quartet (named after violinist Isidore Cohen, member of both the Juilliard Quartet and the Beaux Arts Trio) on Tuesday, April 15, 2025, at 7:30 pm at the Vancouver Playhouse. This group, First Prize Winner at the 2022 Banff International String Quartet Competition and recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2023, will play Mozart’s “Dissonance” Quartet, Beethoven’s Opus 127, the first of his late period quartets, and a new work from composer, jazz pianist, and arranger Billy Childs. Help us celebrate the joys of chamber music at this mainstage season-closing concert, but keep in mind our free concert on Sunday, April 27, 2025, at 1 pm at the Vancouver Academy of Music, our 70th annual Young Musicians Competition. We hope you will join us again soon for either or both of these events.
