Pacifica Quartet finds resolve in timeless compositions of the 1930s and ’40s
Friends of Chamber Music program features works by Barber, Bartók, and Shostakovich with unique historical relevance
The Pacifica Quartet. Photo by Lisa-Marie Mazzucco
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. 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. “To me, it almost looks like a throwback to Gregorian chant. The music looks very worshipful and meditative.”
It’s not surprising, then, that Barber later expanded on the String Quartet in B minor’s second movement in his most famous composition, the Adagio for Strings. Known for its readily accessible beauty, this symphonic enlargement has also become an unofficial American anthem, played on solemn state occasions such as the funerals of presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Half a world away, in Hungary, Bartók also used an older musical culture to spark innovation, but in his case he was hoping to infuse his modernist innovations with the folk vigour of the Transylvanian melodies he transcribed during his pioneering work as a travelling ethnomusicologist.
“This piece is incredible,” Hartman says of the String Quartet No. 4. “It almost seems to invoke a folk band performing, just in terms of the extended techniques it uses. It’s fun for us to be be able to move from the Barber, say, where we’re playing in a very traditional style, to playing more like a band of folk musicians.
“The piece itself also captures, in the slow third movement, the sound of night,” he continues. “The whole work is very evocative—very cinematic, at times—with the slow movement really moving in and out of the shadows, while on either side of that, in the second and fourth movement, you have these little character pieces. In the pizzicato movement you’re also dealing with a very new sound, the ‘Bartók pizz’, and of course at that time the snap pizzicato was not heard that often.”
Shostakovich was also intent on exploring previously unheard sonorities; in the String Quartet No. 2, Hartman is particularly taken with the composer’s use of muted strings to, somewhat paradoxically, convey extreme emotion. His waltz-time third movement, the violinist says, calls for “really fortissimo, loud playing that we’re trying to push through this muted sound.”
A muted scream, or at least an implicit grimace, can often be found in Shostakovich’s music.
“I like to talk to my students about how when Shostakovich smiles, there’s always sort of a crunching,” Hartman notes. “It’s never with great relief that he’s smiling. Any time that there is a sense of optimism in his music, it’s always with this circling shadow that’s cast by the things that he was dealing with.”
Among those factors, of course, was the difficulty of writing music under a despot, Joseph Stalin, who took a keen interest in how the arts could shape—or twist—a culture. 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. “Certainly, this piece feels very triumphant and heroic, especially given the length of it. It’s a big, full piece, about 40 to 45 minutes long, and it’s just an outpouring of ideas and thoughts from his soul. It’s unbelievably imaginative and creative, and it’s something that we get a lot of joy from playing. We’ve also found that the audience really gravitates to this piece. There’s a kind of connectedness that we and the audience members feel when we play and hear this piece. 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. 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. 
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