A quartet made for Shostakovich

By Jeremy Eccles, 25 June 2017

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“they almost took their audience off the audibility charts into blissful silence”

Reviewed at City Recital Hall, Sydney on 24 June 2017

Westlake, String quartet no. 2

Beethoven, String Quartet no. 16 in F major, Op.135

Shostakovich, String Quartet No. 3 in F major, Op.73

Pacifica Quartet

Pacifica Quartet presents Shulamit Ran UK première

James Moriarty, Royal Academy of Music, 16th March

A superb evening's chamber music at Wigmore Hall, with American performers introducing brand new music by an American composer.

*****

Inspirational performances of Mendelssohn, Dohnányi and Franck at the Musica Viva Festival

David Larkin, 7th April

At one point in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the narrator is listening to a sonata for piano and violin by the fictional Vinteuil, when “at a certain moment, without being able to distinguish any clear outline, or to give a name to what was pleasing him, suddenly enraptured, he tried to grasp the phrase or harmony – he did not know which – that had just been played and that had opened and expa

*****

Enigmas and emotions: Outstanding chamber musicians at the Musica Viva Festival in Sydney

David Larkin, 6th April

The noted Beethoven pianist Artur Schnabel was famously interested only in music that he felt was “better than it can be performed”. This idea of works which transcend any individual performance seems particularly true when it comes to Beethoven’s late string quartets, enigmatic masterpieces which continue to pose challenges to interpreters nearly two centuries after they were written.

****1

The “Pacifica Quartet Experience” at Royce Hall

Ted Ayala, 11th April

From across the centuries, the quartets of Beethoven and Shostakovich have come to be regarded as the twin pillars of the quartet repertoire. Think of them as the New Testament and the Old Testament. The Pacifica Quartet offered a program that sandwiched Shostakovich with a pair of quartets by Beethoven.The String Quartet No.

****1

Beethoven in good hands with the Pacifica Quartet at the Metropolitan Museum

Amanda Keil, 10th December

The Pacifica Quartet, now in its third year of residency at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has the formidable task of taking up the role occupied by the Guarnieri Quartet, which played there for 43 of its 45 years. The Pacifica is relatively young, a year or so shy of its tenth birthday, but holds the promise of a venerable ensemble in the making, with chops and class to prove it.

****1

Nelson Goerner shines with the CBSO and Rachmaninov's Rhapsody

Robert Gainer, 9th April

The CBSO present the work of three European émigré composers of the 1930s and 40s, who reimagined their musical influences with contrasting approaches and results.

****1

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Jeremy Eccles

Jeremy Eccles was born in the UK, engaged with music at Dulwich College, Jurisprudence at Oxford and politics at the BBC. Then he made a sea-change to Radio Hong Kong - and culture entered his professional world. On to Australia in 1982, where culture took over, broadcasting on the ABC and writing in all national newspapers, mainly about the performing arts. He formed a local chapter of the International Association of Theatre Critics, contributed to The World of Theatre and edited two magazines. Later, Jeremy began reviewing opera for the Australian Financial Review and dance for the Sydney Review. Most of his writing (and the odd film) today is deep into Indigenous art and culture at aboriginalartdirectory.com, but he maintains a continuing engagement with opera - early, contemporary, on the Harbour and plain old Puccini.

A quartet made for Shostakovich: The Pacifica Quartet in Sydney