Pacifica String Quartet

Named Musical America's 2009 Ensemble of the Year, the Grammy-winning Pacifica Quartet has received international acclaim as one of the finest chamber ensembles performing today. Recent career honors include appointment as quartet-in-residence at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the position held for 43 years by the Guarneri String Quartet. In 2009 the Pacifica was named Ensemble of the Year by Musical America and received the 2009 Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance.

The Pacifica Quartet tours extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia and performs in the world’s major concert halls. The ensemble can be also be heard on many of the nation’s most prominent radio broadcasts, including Chicago’s WFMT, Boston’s WGBH, New York’s WNYC, and American Public Media’s Performance Today and St. Paul Sunday. Having given highly acclaimed performances of the complete Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Elliott Carter string quartets in recent seasons, the Quartet will perform the monumental Shostakovich quartet cycle in Chicago and New York during the 2010-2011 season. In 2011-2012, the Pacifica will take the Shostakovich cycle to London’s Wigmore Hall and will also present the complete Beethoven cycle at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

An ardent advocate of contemporary music, the Pacifica Quartet commissions and performs many new works each year. It has been widely acclaimed for its single-concert performances of Elliott Carter’s complete cycle of five string quartets since it first gave them in 2002 and 2003 in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and abroad. Critics have called these groundbreaking concerts “brilliant,” “astonishing,” and “breathtaking.” In 2008 the Pacifica released its Grammy Award-winning CD recording of Carter’s quartets Nos. 1 and 5 on the Naxos label, and its 2009 release of Carter’s quartets Nos. 2, 3, & 4 completed the two-CD set. The Pacifica’s other CD recordings, including Mendelssohn’s complete string quartets and Declarations: Music Between the Wars, have also attracted praise from critics in the U.S and abroad.

Formed in 1994, the Pacifica Quartet quickly won chamber music’s top competitions, including the 1998 Naumburg Chamber Music Award. In 2002 the ensemble was honored with Chamber Music America’s Cleveland Quartet Award and appointment to The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s program for gifted young musicians. In 2006 the Pacifica was awarded a prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant, becoming only the second chamber music ensemble to be so honored in the Grant’s long history. Also in 2006 the Quartet was featured on the cover of Gramophone magazine and heralded as one of “five new quartets you should know about,” the only American quartet on the list.

PROGRAM NOTES FOR PACIFICA STRING QUARTET CONCERT

Nikolai Myaskovsky (1881-1950)
String Quartet No. 13 in A minor, Op. 86 (1949)

Born in a military frontier town in 1881, Nikolai Myaskovsky seemed destined to follow the military careers of his father and grandfather. He was enrolled in a Cadet College at age ten, followed by military high school in St. Petersburg and the Imperial School of Military Engineering. However, Myaskovsky had long wished to pursue a career in music. He showed a high degree of musical talent at an early age, and despite his father’s displeasure, he actively pursued music instruction throughout his years of military education. In 1906, after several years of military service, he finally won the contest of wills with his father and resigned from the military to prepare for the St. Petersburg Conservatory entrance exam. He was admitted to the Conservatory in 1907 at age 25.

The St. Petersburg Conservatory was dominated by the Russian nationalist tradition of The Five, a group of St. Petersburg composers born in the 1830s and 1840s that included Mussorgsky, Borodin, and Rimsky-Korsakov. They were dedicated to producing a Russian style of music that incorporated folk music and other music drawn from of daily life as well as tonal features they considered distinctly Russian. After graduation, Myaskovsky emerged as a superb craftsman and prolific composer strongly rooted in the conservative Russian nationalist idiom.

String Quartet No. 13, Op. 86, is one of Myaskovsky’s final works, composed in 1949 shortly before his death. In 1951 the quartet and his other final work, Symphony No. 27, Op. 85, were posthumously awarded the Stalin Prize, the Soviet Union’s highest musical honor. This award came despite Myaskovsky’s official censure as a “formalist” in 1948 when the Communist Party launched its campaign against ‘anti-Soviet’ works of art. Unlike Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and other leading composers denounced in 1948, Myaskovsky’s conservative composing style had never fallen from official favor, and throughout his career he had dutifully composed music for official purposes. An incident at the Moscow Conservatory in 1947 suggests that professional jealousy on the part of envious colleagues there may have played a role in his 1948 denunciation.

Myaskovsky’s late style is marked by directness and clarity as well as a movement away from his earlier chromaticism. Quartet No. 13 opens with a lyrical, sweetly melancholy theme in the cello, followed by a playful second theme. In what is basically a rondo, these themes return in many variations while maintaining the opening theme’s yearning quality. The dynamic ‘fantastico’ second movement rushes through its contrasting passages in the manner of an exciting folk tale and ends with an elfin flourish. The singing Andante is exquisitely tender and warmly nostalgic. In the finale, the forceful opening theme and a rhythmic strumming passage alternate with a return of the Andante’s mood of lyrical melancholy. -- Program note by Robert Strong

 

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906 – 1975)
String Quartet No. 9 in E-Flat Major, Op. 117 (1964)

Though Dmitri Shostakovich managed to survive the attacks upon him by Stalin himself in 1936 and by Stalin’s goons in the infamous Zhdanov Decree of 1948, the post-Stalin era saw the composer struggling with a more insidious challenge to his integrity. The following quote is from Elizabeth Wilson’s excellent and moving biography of the composer Shostakovich: A Life Remembered.

"During the 1930s, fear became the uppermost emotion for Shostakovich and for our intelligentsia. It was not only for their personal existence, although that was real enough, but a fear for their families, their work and their whole country.

When, after Stalin’s death the lid was slightly off our hellish cauldron, Dmitri Dmitriyevich went through an ordeal that was even more terrible for an artist: temptation by official fame and flattery, and identification with the prevailing ideology, which was alien to him.”

Then the heavy hammer of official honors, belated glorification, dealt Shostakovich a much more terrible blow than all the criticism of the 1930s and 1940s. Taken under the aegis of the watchful Party eye of the Union of Composers, Shostakovich underwent the most anguished period of his life and art. He was painfully torn between a sincere desire to repay all the unsolicited honours through his work, and his real artist’s view of what was going on in the country." This from Fyodor Druzhinin, the violist who joined the Beethoven Quartet (the Quartet that Shostakovich had given exclusive rights for premiere performances of his String Quartets. They premiered all of the Quartets, except for the first and the last). Incidentally, Druzhinin’s first session with "the Beethovens" in 1964, as a replacement for his ailing teacher, was a read-through of the Ninth and Tenth Quartets – in the presence of the composer.

Without getting too bogged down in Soviet politics, the situation was this: Khrushchev had gained power after the death of Stalin. He then went on to condemn the Stalinist Regime in his historic address to the 20th Party Congress. As part of the façade he wished to create – that of progressive reformer – he conned and coerced Shostakovich into joining the Communist Party; something that the composer had avoided doing all through the Stalinist era. Hoping against hope that reforms would occur (they didn’t), frightened and worn down by bad health (in the last decade of his life he was afflicted with polio, heart disease, approaching blindness, and lung cancer) in 1960 he assented, much to the horror and disappointment of his friends and supporters.

Shostakovich was greatly pained by this. He had always believed that he could best be of service to others by "rendering unto Caesar" and using his personal influence to intercede for others who were in danger from the regime. Wilson’s book cites many instances of his doing just that.

Such was Shostakovich’s genius that he composed his works fully in his mind. He had no use of musical instruments to try out his ideas. He did not make sketches or piano scores of his work, as most composers do. His huge symphonies, as well as his other works were written directly in orchestral scoring, bar by bar. He rarely changed or revised anything. When suggestions for "improvements" came, he would reply to the helpful suggestor something like "You’re correct, but I’ll fix it in the next work".

The Ninth String Quartet was one of the few works that gave him trouble. Elizabeth Wilson writes: "Shostakovich finished the first version of the Ninth Quartet in the autumn of 1961. In a fit of depression, or, to quote his own words, ‘in an attack of healthy self-criticism, I burnt it in the stove. This is the second such case in my creative practice. I once did a similar trick of burning my manuscripts, in 1926’.”

It took Shostakovich nearly three years to settle down and write another Quartet. His ‘second’ Ninth Quartet was completed on 28 May 1964. Dmitri Tsyganov, the leader of the Beethoven Quartet, recalled that Shostakovich told him that the quartet that he had consigned to the flames was based on ‘themes from childhood’; the new Quartet was ‘completely different’."

The Ninth Quartet is to my mind an enigmatic work. It consists of five movements, played without pause. The first four movements each last about 3 ¾ minutes give or take a few seconds. They alternate between fast and slow. The wry first movement opens with an oscillating figure, and the materials introduced in this movement can be found in varied form in other movements. For instance the opening violin theme, albeit transformed, appears in opening of the chorale-like second movement. The third movement, one of Shostakovich’s grotesque polkas, also contains material from the first movement. The end of the third movement then provides the opening figure for the fourth movement. This movement also contains the oscillating figure from the first movement, as well as striking chordal pizzicatos. In his liner notes for the Manhattan String Quartet’s recording of the Ninth Quartet, Richard Kassel suggests that the melody of this movement is closely related to the opening of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, which Shostakovich had orchestrated in 1959. Who knows? The last movement is at least twice as long as any other of the movements. It is made up of episodes, often strident and grotesque, not the least of which is a section which sounds like a musical representation of malevolent poultry. This is followed by a mess of counterpoint, a cello recitative including the chordal pizzicatos, again based on the "Boris Godunov" theme, as well as fragments of the polka and material from previous movements.

The Ninth Quartet was dedicated to the composer’s third wife Irena Supenskaya, a young musicologist whom he married in 1962. As mentioned, it was premiered by the Beethoven Quartet in Moscow on Nov. 20, 1964. The next day it was premiered in Leningrad (St. Petersburg). --Program note by Joseph Way, used with permission

 

Ludwig van Beethoven
Quartet in F Major, Op. 59, No. 1

The first “Rasumovsky” Quartet seems more like the consummation of a style than the beginning, in chamber music, of Beethoven’s middle period. The spacious conception, the high expressivity, the sweep of formal structure, the beautiful melodies, the rich harmonies, the surging rhythms, and the brilliant string writing – all attest to surety, confidence, and maturity.

The monumental Allegro opens with a serene and noble first theme, starting low in the cello and soaring up to the first violin’s highest register. Several other distinctive melodic phrases round out the first group of themes before the first violin introduces the upward-stretching second subject. Again, further themes fill out this second group. A codetta, based on a melody obviously derived from the first theme, concludes the exposition. The development, which starts like a repeat of the exposition, is vast in size and imaginatively varied, with a brilliant fugal center section. The cello sneaks in to start the recapitulation under a descending scale in the first violin. The building and enriching process continues through the recapitulation and concluding coda.

Musicians in Beethoven’s day considered the opening rhythmic drumming on one note in the second movement strange and oddly amusing. Although the movement is lighter in mood than the Allegro, it still is somewhat restless and ill at ease. As in the previous movement, Beethoven uses many themes, some dancing and gaily abandoned others more lyrical and songlike. The structure can be interpreted either as a scherzo with two trios or as sonata form; in any case it is a thoroughly satisfying movement that grows organically and inevitably from the melodic material.

Scholars suspect that the enigmatic words, “A weeping willow or acacia tree upon my brother’s grave,” penned by Beethoven on the sketches for this movement, give an insight into the intent of this great and profoundly moving slow movement. Some say that the brooding intensity has to do with the composer’s distress over his brother Casper Carl’s marriage to Johanna Reiss, six months pregnant, and his belief that Casper’s life had effectively ended. Others hold that the sorrow was evoked by the memory of another brother, born one year before Ludwig, who died in infancy. In any event, the lament, written in sonata form, has two cantilena themes, both characterized by wide intervals between the notes. The first is stated at the outset by the first violin; the second is sung by the cello while the violin weaves a filigree accompaniment above. The rest of the movement grows from these two melodies, as Beethoven continuously reexamines, reworks, and recasts them until a series of brilliant runs in the first violin brings the movement to an end.

The Thème Russe (“Russian theme”) of the finale follows without pause. No one is sure whether Count Rasumovsky asked Beethoven to include a Russian melody in the quartet, or whether the composer did it to honor his patron. Nevertheless, it has been determined that Beethoven derived the melody from a collection of Russian folk songs published by Ivan Pratsch. While the song was originally in minor and in a slow tempo, it appears here in major and at double the speed. In this sonata form movement, the dance-like rhythm of the first theme is followed by a contrasting legato subsidiary subject played by the second violin. At the very end Beethoven slows down the last statement of the Thème Russe by a factor of four before a brilliant flourish concludes the quartet.

Notes from Guide to Chamber Music, by Melvin Berger ©1985 (used with permission).