The Pacifica Quartet
Forget all that stuff about string quartets on hire, playing Pachelbel’s Canon for the 400th time at weddings and fancy dinner parties. The Pacifica Quartet, an established foursome on the international chamber music scene, dispelled any such pretenses in a concert at Unity Temple last Saturday. With Frank Lloyd Wright’s elegantly conceived lines defining lights, windows, seating, ceiling, and yes, even radiators, the quartet brought its own brand of artistic design to the surroundings in three European works that were anything but trite.
With first violinist Simin Ganatra solidly in the lead, these four simple instruments rivaled an 80-piece orchestra in its ability to capture the human story. Any veteran quartet playing for decades would have been challenged by the depth of expression and technical difficulty of this weighty program. But with technique clearly to burn, the Pacifica Quartet was free to explore the nuances and musical details that made for intimate communication with the audience.
While Haydn churned out quartets by the dozens in the 18th century, the 19th century produced a decidedly more calculated and intensely personal approach to the genre. The “E-flat Quartet, Opus 12” from the teenage hand of Felix Mendelssohn shows an astonishing range of moods, from tentative awakenings of the first movement to the vigorous fire of the virtuosic finale. Pacifica, here and throughout the evening, seemed on the verge of rapture with lightning-quick transitions seamlessly held together by deft fingerwork.
The Moravian-born Leos Janacek is perhaps best known to American audiences for his operas, which, barely heard during his lifetime, have experienced something of a revival in the past 40 years. In his last year of life, he commenced on his second quartet, an expression of newfound love for a much younger woman. Although old in years, Janacek did not lack for energy or vigor, as passionately expressed in this gut-wrenching music. Subtitled, “Intimate Letters,” the music does not simply declare, but shouts the agony of an undying love. Yes, there were only four players on four thin strings each, but they visibly moved the audience with their heartfelt reading of this rarely heard work.
In neighboring Bohemia, Bedrich Smetana had paved the way for voices such as Janacek’s in the generation before. Known to thousands of music appreciation students for simply one work, “The Moldau,” Smetana’s first effort in the venerable quartet genre is an intensely personal offering titled, “From My Life.”
Written in his early 50s, one senses that Smetana was still living on the edge, soaring sometimes through hours of extreme bliss, consumed by love and ambitions, and yet stymied in later years by the daunting onset of deafness and the strains of a fading existence. Especially in the rowdy polka (of course there was a polka), the furious give-and-take among the four players was fascinating.
Nothing could add to such a hefty musical menu, except perhaps an after-dinner mint. We enjoyed both the sounds and the sights of the amusing, but fiendishly difficult Allegro pizzicato from Béla Bartók’s “Fourth Quartet” as an encore. As the players began to pluck, snap, and strum like guitarists, one had the sense that, even without bows in hand, the sounds of this foursome still welled up and cascaded into Wright’s beautiful space with the power and purpose of water over a dam.
This evening offered a rare mix of insightful and moving music from the European tradition. Sadly, the opportunity to hear quartets such as this is all too rare in Oak Park. With four highly ambitious personalities, every quartet is an endangered species-as fragile as the will of its players to hang together through the conflicts and exhilaration that make up the lives of professional performers. One hopes that, just as this highly gifted team is preserving the treasury of exquisite four-part string music, this community will continue to provide an audience to take in such a powerful art form.