Pacifica Quartet
Nov. 16th, 2004 11:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cellioI 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. :-)
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Date: 2004-11-17 02:58 pm (UTC)