Pacifica quartet shostakovich jazz

Friends of Chamber Music presents the Pacifica Quartet at the Vancouver Playhouse on April 1 at 7:30 pm

AN EASY WAY to describe the program that the Pacifica Quartet will bring to its Friends of Chamber Music concert at the Vancouver Playhouse on April 1 is that it offers a concise guide to the sonic innovations of the 1930s and ’40s.

Samuel Barber’s String Quartet in B minor was written in 1936, Béla Bartók’s String Quartet No.

4 in C major in 1928, and Dmitri Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 2 in A major in 1944. Over the course of the 20th century, we hear the evolution of the Soviet quartet from the late-Romantic styles of Miaskovsky and, to a lesser extent Prokofiev, to an idiom in which the model becomes Shostakovich’s own (Weinberg), and later begins to seek out new directions (Schnittke).

3). It’s very moving—and, we feel, very timely.”

Timeliness is another link between the works on this program: all three composers were dealing with issues that are far from resolved today. The monumental recordings are notable for including quartets by some of the composer’s most significant Soviet-era contemporaries.

“It almost seems to invoke a folk band performing, just in terms of the extended techniques it uses. While these three works are very different in tone and character, they all reflect a time in which music was rapidly evolving away from the orthodoxies of the Romantic period toward the more polyglot sensibility we enjoy today.

One strategy, as deployed by Barber, is to look back while moving forward—which in his case meant escaping the Jazz Age to explore older verities.

“When you look at the score, you see the way it’s written with these very large note values: big whole notes and half notes,” Austin Hartman, second violinist of the Pacifica Quartet, explains to Stir.

We’ve also found that the audience really gravitates to this piece. Throughout his career, Shostakovich walked a tightrope between self-expression and displeasing Stalin’s censors; as Hartman points out, the String Quartet No. 2 was written not that long after the composer’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk had been slammed in Pravda as “muddle, not music.” (Stalin did not write the anonymous review himself, but certainly approved it for publication.)

Consequently, Shostakovich became a great master of the coded message, and the underlying theme of the String Quartet No.

2 is, I think, resolve in the face of repression.

“Resolve is a wonderful word,” Hartman agrees. Barber was enduring the stigma of being a gay man in heteronormative America; Bartók was grappling with the rise of fascism and the erasure of traditional cultures; Shostakovich was in constant danger of being literally cancelled—sent to the Gulag or simply shot—by his authoritarian overlords.

But whether you view the Pacifica Quartet’s upcoming concert as an elegant history lesson or a coded comment on our own moment in time, the music will be equally inspiring.

To the excellent versions of the 15 Shostakovich Quartets, the Pacifica adds four quartets by Shostakovich’s contemporaries. There’s a kind of connectedness that we and the audience members feel when we play and hear this piece. It’s unbelievably imaginative and creative, and it’s something that we get a lot of joy from playing.

These quartets are paired with Mieczyslaw Weinberg's adventurous, symphonic-scaled String Quartet No. 6 of 1946, an inventive work once banned in the Soviet Union for being ahead of its time.

Alexander Varty