Pacifica Quartet

[cellio]

Friday night at services someone asked me if I would join him Monday night for a chamber-music concert. (He'd been given two tickets and his wife wasn't able to make it.) I enjoy string quartets, so I said sure.

I am not especially educated in matters of classical music. (Renaissance music, sure. Medieval, yeah. But not so much the later stuff.) Thus, I did not know two of the three composers whose works were performed.

The group was the Pacifica Quartet, and they were fun to watch. They were clearly engaged with the music, and they really seemed to play with a hive mind. They've been together a while, and it shows. Overall they played very well; during the quietist passages one of the violin players seemed to have a little trouble avoiding a raspy sound, but other than that the music was well-done.

They led off with Mendelssohn's Quartet in A minor, Opus 13, which I enjoyed. (This was the piece with the bowing problem, but other than that...) This was the only familiar-sounding music of the evening.

The second piece was written by Gyorgy Ligeti in 1953. (String Quartet #1, Metamorphoses Nocturnes.) I could tell that they were playing it well, but I disliked the composition. It was one of those kitchen-sink compositions -- a bunch of random bits thrown together without overall cohesion. A composition professor once told me "look, you don't have to use all your clever ideas in one piece"; I wish someone had told Ligeti that, too. Actually, the musicians introduced that one by pointing out a very short motif that (they said) he used throughout the piece to tie it together, but it wasn't a big-enough chunk to be a meaningful motif in my opinion, and I guess it was well-hidden in most of those places. The musicians seemed to be having fun playing the piece, and the composer probably had fun writing it, but ultimately it has to be fun for the audience. Maybe it was for other audience members.

The final piece (after an intermission) was by Czech composer Bedrich Smetana (Quartet #1 in E minor "From My Life"). It was stunning. I'd never heard of Smetana, and apparently he only wrote two string quartets, but I'm going to keep my eye out for recordings.

They actually did an encore (I didn't know that chamber music ran to encores), but the person who introduced it was too far from the microphone and neither my companion nor I could make out what it was. It sounded fairly modern compared to the two 19th-century pieces, and it was short (no longer than one movement of one of the other pieces). There's no obvious mention of it in the program; I guess it would be tacky to list your encore piece.

One thing that surprised me is how seldom the musicians turned pages in the music. For the most part, they were doing entire movements without page turns. Now granted, each musician probably has only his part, and the stand can accommodate three pages (though most of the music was in two-page spreads, at least in the viola player's music, the only music I could look right down on), but still. It's got to be pretty densely packed, assuming there's not serious memorization happening. And the musicians were moving around a fair bit (swaying, I mean, not getting up and dancing :-) ), so it couldn't have been written too small or they wouldn't have been able to see it.

I was a little surprised by the length of the concert. As I said, I don't know much about classical music, so I went in thinking "how long can a string quartet be? 20 minutes?" The Mendelssohn was about 35 minutes (if the concert started on time, and it was close); I didn't note times on the other two. The concert ran about 2:10 including the intermission (and the intermission wasn't that long). So much for my prediction to Dani that I'd probably be done about the same time he was done with choir practice. :-)

Comments

[kayre]

One thing that surprised me is how seldom the musicians turned pages in the music. For the most part, they were doing entire movements without page turns. Now granted, each musician probably has only his part, and the stand can accommodate three pages (though most of the music was in two-page spreads, at least in the viola player's music, the only music I could look right down on), but still.

Orchestra parts are usually oversized, 11 x 14, and you're right, they have only their own line, so each page can hold 10 or even 12 staves, 6 or 8 measures per line.... it's really quite a lot of music. And then if they rest for more than a measure or two, it's condensed with a 'tacet' marking, though that's not too common in quartet music.

It can be very frustrating as a keyboardist, struggling with a page turn every minute or two while the instrumentalists do entire movements from just one page!

[cellio]

Yeah, I was watching/listening for collapsed rests, but that didn't happen very much.

It can be very frustrating as a keyboardist, struggling with a page turn every minute or two while the instrumentalists do entire movements from just one page!

Yup! And I assume that most keyboardists do not get assigned page-turners even when playing with orchestras (where you'd figure hey, what's one more person down there?), so you have to find a break in the music to do it yourself. (Which the person who paginated the music should have thought about, but that doesn't always result in easy-to-use music.)

[kayre]

There are standing jokes among musicians that Schirmer Publishing employs one editor whose sole job is to figure out how to put the page turns in the most difficult or illogical places. :)

[lyev.livejournal.com]

Great user icon! He looks a bit like William(?) Cecil, Elizabeth's advisor. But I can't imagine you putting scanning a non-musician in ;-) Who is he?

[cellio]

Palestrina, so definitely anachronistic. :-) ommkarja made the icon for me.

[ichur72.livejournal.com]

Ligeti is an interesting composer. If you've ever seen 2001: A Space Odyssey and remember the eerie-heavenly-choir bits from the soundtrack, that's him. Based on what I remember from my music history class in college, I disagree about the kitchen-sink approach. Ligeti was big on a technique that he dubbed micropolyphony, which boils down to (IIRC) using lots of instruments/voices playing/singing at very small intervals. But I do agree that his work can be hard listening. The structure of the music isn't always obvious, and it's not meant to be clearly melodic. (The small intervals aren't conducive to that, and like many other 20th CE composers he makes liberal use of dissonance.)

[cellio]

The structure of the music isn't always obvious, and it's not meant to be clearly melodic.

That may explain why I was having trouble identifying any structure in it. :-)

To the best of my knowledge this is the only piece of his I've heard. (I did see 2001, but it was ages ago and I don't remember the musical details any more.) I'm not trying to make sweeping statements about his music; I felt this particular piece sounded like a random jumble, but maybe there's structure there that's only discernable if you study the score closely.

Perhaps surprisingly, I didn't really have a problem with his use of dissonance. I mean, it's not the kind of dissonance I prefer -- I'm old-school; give me liberal use of suspensions any day -- but it didn't jump out and grab me.

[ichur72.livejournal.com]

Upon further thought, I can see why it might have struck you as a jumble. I did at one point have a CD of his music -- I think it was a cello concerto. (Which is why I bought it -- mmmm, cello.) Anyway, I figured out at one point that I couldn't use it as dropping-off-to-sleep music. There just weren't enough turning points or resolution to keep it from sounding a little spooky.