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559362 bk Carter US 15/11/07 19:27 Page 4 Pacifica Quartet AMERICAN CLASSICS Simin Ganatra, Violin I • Sibbi Bernhardsson, Violin II Masumi Per Rostad, Viola • Brandon Vamos, Cello Recognized for its virtuosity, exuberant performance style, and often daring repertory choices, the Pacifica Quartet has carved out a compelling musical path. Since the group first came together in 1994, the ensemble has swept top Elliott prizes in several leading international competitions from the Cleveland Quartet Award to the Naumburg. In 2006, the Pacifica was awarded the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant, only the second chamber music ensemble ever to be selected. The Pacifica Quartet tours extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and the Far East, with frequent CARTER broadcasts. Prolific in the recording studio, the quartet’s acclaimed recordings include the complete string quartets of Mendelssohn, Dvofiák chamber works, and the complete quartets of Easley Blackwood. Recitals include cycles of the complete string quartets of Beethoven. The Pacifica was appointed a member of The Chamber Music Society of String Quartets Nos. 1 and 5 Lincoln Center’s CMS Two programme for gifted young musicians in 2002. The Quartet is an ardent advocate of contemporary music, commissioning and performing as many as eight new works a year. A champion of the string quartets of Elliott Carter, the ensemble has distinguished itself with performances of the complete cycle of five Pacifica Quartet quartets in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Cleveland, and abroad in Japan, Germany, and the Edinburgh International Festival. As resident string quartet for Contempo, one of the country’s leading contemporary music organizations, the Quartet presents a series of concerts each year devoted exclusively to new music. In 2004, the Pacifica Quartet was appointed Faculty Quartet-in-Residence at the University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign. The Quartet members also serve as resident performing artists at the University of Chicago and at the Longy School of Music. The Pacifica Quartet was awarded top prizes in three of chamber music’s most important international competitions for young ensembles: the 1996 Coleman Chamber Music Competition, the 1997 Concert Artists Guild Competition, and the 1998 Naumburg Chamber Music Competition. In 2002, the Quartet was further honored with Chamber Music America’s prestigious Cleveland Quartet Award, which led to a series of concerts in eight of America’s most prestigious venues. The members of the Pacifica Quartet share a unique history of personal and musical friendship. First violinist Simin Ganatra, born and raised in southern California, initially played with cellist Brandon Vamos and violinist Sibbi Bernhardsson while they were all teenagers. Sibbi Bernhardsson later introduced violist Masumi Rostad to the group. Originating on the West Coast, where it played many of its earliest concerts together, the quartet takes its name from the awe-inspiring Pacific Ocean. Instruments Simin Ganatra: G.B. Ceruti, Cremona, 1810 Sibbi Bernhardsson: Carlo Antonio Testore, 1764 Masumi Per Rostad: Joseph Hill, London, 1770 Brandon Vamos: Gasparo da Salo, Brescia, c.1580 8.559362 4 559362 bk Carter US 15/11/07 19:27 Page 2 Elliott Carter (b. 1908) The Fantasia that emerges from the opening cello forceful rhetoric; a remote Adagio sereno of high string String Quartet No. 1 (1950-51) • String Quartet No. 5 (1995) solo is constructed as a wave-like sequence of paragraphs, harmonics; and finally, a bizarre pizzicato coda marked fluctuating in tempo, and within which the simultaneous Capriccioso. By contrast, the comparatively random- Although a very few composers have just about innovation as an end in itself, but as a means to capture instrumental lines themselves often seem to be unfolding sounding (though exactly notated) Introduction and managed to keep going into their tenth decades, it is – with a ‘focussed freedom’ – the teeming at different speeds. Suddenly this collapses into the linking Interludes I-V evoke those breaks in rehearsal hard to think of a precedent for the inexhaustible simultaneities and changefulness of modern life. Allegro scorrevole, a whirling continuum of thematic when individual players may be heard simultaneously creativity of the American master Elliott Carter as he This, he found, was not easily done: ‘Each new scraps, interrupted only by a more sustained trio-like practising snippets of a movement just played, or the next approaches his centenary. But then as a New York piece is a crisis in my life,’ he once remarked. But the section and the first of the work’s two pauses. At length to come. The result is a teasing kind of double focus in schoolboy after the First World War he did have the result was a slowly appearing succession of vastly the Allegro scorrevole slows into the Adagio, which which the same materials are heard in contexts of order good fortune to grow up during a particularly detailed masterpieces from the epic String Quartet No 1 alternates, and later superimposes, aggressive recitative- and (apparent) disorder – raising interesting questions adventurous phase in the city’s cultural history. (1951) by way of the grandiose Variations for like figures for viola and cello and remotely floating lines about the nature of musical coherence and continuity, and Personally encouraged by that awesome American Orchestra (1956) and coruscating Double Concerto for the two violins. This in turn yields to a transition of typical of the mercurial lightness of spirit that has pioneer Charles Ives, and early excited by the modernist (1961) to the tumultuous Concerto for Orchestra (1969) flying scales and jerky rhythms, throwing up terse figures increasingly characterized the later works of Elliott Carter. masterpieces of Skryabin, Stravinsky, Berg and Varèse and kaleidoscopic A Symphony of Three Orchestras which, after the second pause, prove to be the themes of which Koussevitzky and Stokowski were then (1976), which established his international reputation. the ensuing Variations. Recurring in different Bayan Northcott promoting, Carter retains to this day a notion of The reward for this heroic middle period has been the combinations and speeding up at different rates, these modernism as a breaking away from convention, a increasing ease and spontaneity of his composing in themes eventually evaporate, leaving the solo violin to Composer’s note continuing quest for new modes of sound and more recent decades, enabling him to complete not only complete the grand design, fading into the stratosphere. expression. the largest orchestral project of his life Symphonia If the String Quartet No. 1 has a rough-hewn, I probably decided to write what was to be the First It was, however, to take him many years to sort out (1992-6) in his late eighties and his first opera What pioneering bigness about it, Carter’s ensuing quartets Quartet when I read about a composition prize in Liege, the implications of those tumultuous first impressions. Next? (1998) at the age of ninety, but a dazzling array of embodied not only further developments but Belgium, because there were many ideas swarming After studying with Holst for a few months at Harvard further pieces – an Indian Summer that has now lasted concentrations of its discoveries. In the tense String around in my imagination about expression, rhythm, and in 1932, he submitted to three years of strict instruction over a quarter of a century. Quartet No. 2, (1959) he assigned each of the four harmony, mostly derived from my Cello Sonata. I read in Paris under the neo-classically inclined Nadia The String Quartet No. 1 was a turning-point in instruments its own materials and playing techniques, through all the Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Debussy, Boulanger – only to find that the New Deal United Carter’s development, the first work in which he deriving his form from their conversation – like four Ravel, Bartók, Berg, and Ruth Crawford Seeger quartets States to which he returned in 1935 favoured a more decided to bring together all his most advanced different characters interacting in a drama. In the String to find a way of using the four instruments to present my populist reaching out to the masses in the manner of his techniques on the largest scale, without worrying too Quartet No. 3 (1971), he divided the players into two ideas. As I began to compose, with a Guggenheim friend Copland. For a time Carter emulated his example much whether the result would be easy to play or listen duos, each pursuing its own movement-sequence – the Fellowship, in Tucson, Arizona, I soon realized that the in such approachable works as the Symphony No 1 to - a score as complex in its rhythmic relationships as it form derived from the superimposing and cross-cutting of work would make such demands on performers that it (1942) and Holiday Overture (1944) [Naxos 8.559151], is uncompromising in its gritty harmonic language. the two – while the String Quartet No. 4 (1985) reverts to might never be performed, yet I continued. To my surprise but by the mid-1940s it was evident that the neat forms Although the piece is laid out against the background of some extent to the texture of No. 2, but against a four- it won the Liège Prize and the Walden Quartet became the of neo-classicism and the simplicities of populism were an almost classical four-movement sequence – movement plan and making more dramatic use of pauses. first of many to play it. Then my Second, Third, and too restrictive to contain his more modernistic Fantasia, Allegro scorrevole (a kind of scherzo), Yet, in seeking to round off his quartet sequence, Carter Fourth Quartets developed my imaginings in different aspirations. Adagio, Variations – there are only two short pauses in opted in his String Quartet No. 5 (1995) not for some ways until I began to realize that soon I would exhaust this With the appearance of his majestic Piano Sonata its 45-minute unfolding, and these occur not between, monumental summing-up but for a more playful, direction, and so my Fifth Quartet became a farewell to (1946), he embarked upon a radical redefining of every but within movements: the first pause in the middle of divertimento-like farewell.