Pacifica Quartet defines Beethoven

Beethoven’s early String Quartet in B-flat, Op. 18, No. 6, was a perfect match for the Pacifica Quartet at a National Gallery recital on Sunday. This is an ensemble that highly values beauty of tone and coherent musical architecture. The musicians did keen justice to the winning melodic invention and classical structure in this Mozartean work — not least in first violinist Simin Ganatra’s sweet, ethereal treatment of her solo lines in music that’s structured at times like a miniature violin concerto.

The Pacifica was incisive with the starker, more brooding Beethoven in his mid-career Quartet in F Minor, Op. 95 (the so-called “Serioso”). But the quartet’s roundedness of tone and subtle balancing kept a lid on the work’s potential for high drama, emphasizing the score’s indebtedness to 18th-century traditions rather than its bolder gestures toward the future.

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(Anthony Parmelee/Anthony Parmelee) - The Pacifica String Quartet

Even Beethoven’s intense, epically proportioned late work, the Quartet in B-flat, Op. 130 — performed here (as it should be) with the mighty Grosse Fuge as its final movement — emerged more as a rhapsodic outpouring of romantic feeling than as a tortured and ecstatic journey into the cosmos.

The abrupt interruptions in the opening movement were incorporated cogently into the shape of the whole, the presto danced lightly on its feet, and the famous Cavatina was warmly felt but a bit dry-eyed at a flowing tempo. Only in the Grosse Fuge did the gloves come off, allowing us to hear the players sacrifice a bit of their gorgeous tone to really dig into the tortured side of the composer.

Banno is a freelance writer.