Pacifica Quartet returns with impeccable playing and flair to spare

WHEN Pacifica Quartet appeared here four years ago audiences were struck by their precision and authority but also their energy and joie de vivre.

Pacifica Quartet are impressing audiences with their precision and energy.

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WHEN US foursome Pacifica Quartet appeared at the Musica Viva Festival four years ago audiences were struck by their precision and authority but also the energy and joie de vivre of their performances.

Back for their first Musica Viva national tour they are delighting old fans and winning new ones with two programs that show off both their tight ensemble playing and control of structure and nuance.

Pacifica is the quartet in residence at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music – the largest in the world with 1700 students. Before that they were given the rare honour of being resident ensemble at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Lead violin Simin Ganatra is full of animation as she shapes her phrases while her husband Brandon Vamos crouches and sways over his cello. Second violin Sibbi Bernhardsson interweaves deftly and brings his intelligence to bear not only to the music but also in his introductiory remarks while violist Masumi Per Rostad, perched on a piano stool, exudes elegance both in his playing but also in his beautifully cut suit and matching polka dot socks and breast pocket handkerchief.

SPARSE

For their Saturday afternoon concert they changed the playing order by opening with Beethoven’s last quartet, the Op 135. Here they were on familiar ground for the group has performed the whole cycle of 16 quartets over three days – an amazing feat of endurance.

They are also famous for their Shostakovich interpretations and his sparse and beautiful third quartet ended this program.

The other work on the program was a revisiting of Australian composer Nigel Westlake’s String quartet No.2, commissioned for Musica Viva in 2005 and originally performed by the Goldner Quartet.

Westlake is best known for his film scores – he did both the Babe movies – but his “serious” work is both accessible to the audience and challenging to performers.

The quartet is in four contrasting movements and features strong cross rhythms in the outer movements and a longer arcing slow movement in which Gantra’s fiddle and Vamos’s cello interwove in an expressive question and answer passage over droning middle strings.

This was a terrific concert and it was disappointing to see several empty seats in the auditorium.

Concert-goers get another chance to hear them at City Recital Hall Angel Place on Monday, June 26, at 7pm, when they perform a program of works by Haydn, Mendelssohn and reprise the Westlake piece.

DETAILS

● CONCERT: Pacifica Quartet

● WHERE: City Recital Hall Angel Place

● WHEN: Saturday, June 24