Biography

Simin Ganatra  -  violin             
Austin Hartman  -  violin   
Mark Holloway  -  viola          
Brandon Vamos  -  cello

Anthony McGill  -  clarinet

“Brilliant,” “astonishing,” “gripping,” and “breathtaking” are just some of the descriptions that have been bestowed on the Pacifica Quartet. Formed in 1994, the Quartet quickly began winning the chamber music competitions, including the 1998 Naumburg Chamber Music Award and in 2006, a prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant. The Quartet is renowned for its presentations of complete cycles, including those of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Shostakovich (in Montreal, among other cities), and Carter. The Pacifica Quartet has been the quartet-in-residence at Indiana University since 2012. Prior to that it was on the faculty of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana from 2003 to 2012. It also served as resident performing artist at the University of Chicago for seventeen years, and as the quartet-in-residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. For its fourth LMMC appearance, the Pacifica Quartet is joined by Anthony McGill, principal clarinetist in the New York Philharmonic and the first African-American principal player in the Philharmonic’s history. Among other honors, McGill was a participant in the inauguration of President Barack Obama, premiering a piece written for the occasion by John Williams.

https://www.pacificaquartet.com/

https://www.anthonymcgill.com/

Notes

On June 22, 1941, the Nazis broke their nonaggression pact with Russia and invaded the country, stopping just twenty miles short of Moscow. The Russian government, fearful of the wellbeing of its artists, evacuated many of them, including Prokofiev, who landed up in Nalchik after a three-day train trip. There he wrote his Second String Quartet, which was directly inspired by Kabardinian folk music of the northern Caucasus. “I felt,” wrote Prokofiev, “that the combination of new, untouched Oriental folklore with the most classical of classic forms, the string quartet, could yield interesting and unexpected results.” The first performance, given in Moscow on September 5, 1942, started late due to a Nazi air raid. The composer deemed his quartet “an extremely turbulent success.”

The early nineteenth century saw rapid developments in the design and construction of many instruments. One of the greatest beneficiaries of this technical progress was the clarinet, for which Weber wrote no fewer than seven compositions between 1811 and 1816 featuring the instrument in concerted or chamber music. All but one were written for the virtuoso Heinrich Bärmann, principal clarinetist of the Munich court orchestra. The Clarinet Quintet admirably shows off Bärmann’s many admirable qualities: his ability to leap effortlessly from one extreme of the range to the other, to produce startling contrasts of loud and soft, to play with the agility of a violin, and to make the clarinet truly sing. The Quintet’s engaging charm, elegant beauty, and virtuosic effects all contribute to making this the third most popular Clarinet Quintet after those of Mozart and Brahms.

Just as Mozart and Weber had been inspired to write some of their finest works for a particular clarinetist, so too did Brahms create a series of works for a clarinetist who greatly impressed him. This man was Richard Mühlfeld, principal clarinetist of the Meiningen court orchestra, one of the finest in Europe at the time. Brahms wrote four works for Mühlfeld, every one a masterpiece: a trio, a quintet, and two sonatas. Polish, sensitivity, refined musicianship, a warm tone, and intimacy of expression were the attributes Brahms particularly admired in Mühlfeld’s playing, and the Quintet (1891) was written with these qualities in mind. Autumnal melancholy, mellow reflection, nostalgic tranquility, and a backward glance on life are all descriptions commonly invoked to describe this ravishingly beautiful quintet, one of Brahms’s most beloved compositions in any medium.

Robert Markow