Music@Menlo: Concert Program II features the Pacifica Quartet performing three distinct masterworks that illuminate some facet of each composer’s life. Can you describe the relationship the Pacifica Quartet has to these three works?
Pacifica Quartet: As a quartet, we are privileged to have such a vast amount of great masterpieces to play. These three quartets are a perfect example of that. These are works we love playing, and every time we work on them we discover something new in them. We have also recorded the emotionally charged Janáček quartet and will be recording the Beethoven op. 135 in the very near future.
M@M: One could argue that these works “humanize” each composer. What do you feel the audience should take away from this concert after experiencing an inward glimpse into the lives of each of these composers through their music? What do you take away as a performer?
PQ: These three quartets are all written at the end of their composers’ lives and as such you can sense that they are a culmination of the composers’ creative and personal lives. The Opus 135 shows beautifully a person who has come to terms with his fate and is at peace with himself after a lifetime of struggle. It shows a completely new creative direction and gives us a glimpse of what his fourth period could have possibly been like. The Smetana and Janáček have a certain narrative element to them. These works also very much deal with personal struggles. Smetana uses a theme he described as his fate motive throughout the work. Janáček uses what he described as the death motive in the last movement.
M@M: One of the pieces you will be performing is Janáček’s String Quartet no. 2, Intimate Letters. Janáček’s musical language is very different from Smetana’s and Beethoven’s. Are there any musical similarities between the Janáček and the other two works on the program that you can point to?
PQ: A great feature of this program is how each work has its own unique voice. Beethoven is wonderfully complex in the sense that he so effortlessly is using different themes at the same time and juxtaposing them with each other. Yet the music sounds often so simple in its sincerity and optimism. This work has one of Beethoven’s absolutely most profound and beautiful slow movements. The Smetana is a wonderfully romantic work. It is colorful and lyrical. It is dramatic and brilliant and highly emotional. When one sees a score of the Janáček, the first impression is how personal the notation is. This is highly neurotic music. It goes from being tender and sweet to brutal and forceful within a phrase. The contrasts are so powerful and stark that it is almost impossible to notate these emotions. One of the challenges in preparing this work is in a way getting out of the score. The Janáček looks and sounds very different from anything by any other composer. This is some of the most gripping music one will encounter. All three works are vastly different. But all are wonderful works. They are brilliantly composed and all profoundly moving works in their own different ways.