The “Pacifica Quartet Experience” at Royce Hall

The American Pacifica Quartet was convincingly introduced to Aussie Nigel Westlake's Second Quartet for their Down Under tour; but revealed its essence in the theatre of Shostakovich.

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

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

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.

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.

Beethoven's Christus am Ölberge is paired with Haydn's Die sieben letzten Worte, a journey from agony to transcendence in which the agony proves the more honest companion.