Pacifica

Anthony McGill, New York Philharmonic principal clarinet and 2020 Avery Fisher Prize winner, and the multiple Grammy Award-winning Pacifica Quartet present an album illuminating experiences that have shaped America through works by Richard Danielpour, James Lee III, Ben Shirley (all three world-premiere recordings), and Valerie Coleman. McGill describes it as a project driven by the desire to “expand the capacity for art and music to change the world.”

Fire Beneath My Fingers tells a fascinating story of great performers and performances! This program showcases Antonio Vivaldi, Guiseppe Sammartini, and Guiseppe Tartini; three of the most legendary composers of this era who were also virtuoso performers in their own rights.

French Baroque instrumental music (in this case from the last two decades of the seventeenth century) enjoys a somewhat doubtful reputation as being mannered and all cast in the same mould. Well, there is no smoke without fire, and sure enough, the individual movements on this recording do all sound in some wise “typical”, with the usual French dance movements (sarabande, gigue, rondeau, menuet, gavotte) predominating. And yet, there are here some outstanding passages: If you want a sample of what Marin Marais was capable of in an area other than that of his belovèd viola da gamba, then listen in to CD 1, Track 8 (Passacaille) or CD 2, Track 6 (Chaconne), where the instruments intertwine and swirl around each other for well over five minutes at a time.

Telemann could be exuberantly grotesque and also almost inhumanly serious. He loved large and brash and sometimes outré instrumental ensembles, and wrote brilliantly for them, but he also wrote copiously for small groups and for amateurs, in the most elegant style. One or two of his cantatas were once pardonably mistaken for Bach, and one or two movements of his orchestral suites might even now be mistaken for a mid-twentieth-century composer in a puckish mood. He is, in short, rather a difficult personality to pin down.

The concertos of Francesco Mancini (1672-1737) recorded here all come from a 1725 manuscript collection now in the Biblioteca del Conservatorio di Musica di Napoli…The collection is entitled "Concerti di Flauto, Violino, Violetta e Basso di Diversi Autori". Interestingly enough, in the individual part-books, the pieces are all called "sonatas". This discrepancy of nomenclature reflects the general fluidity of form throughout the Baroque era. The forms of pieces called "concerto", "quartet", "sonata", "canzona", and "fantasia" were not standardized, and the terms were frequently used interchangeably.

Like American comedian W.C. Fields, American composer Elliott Carter never believed in giving the listener an even break. In the three string quartets recorded here, Carter used all the tools at his command a virtuoso technique, an adroit intellect, and an unsurpassed ability to write ruthlessly independent counterpoint to challenge and confound the unsuspecting listener.

The Pacifica Quartet's cycle of Shostakovich's string quartets, joined with several by Mieczyslaw Weinberg under the rubric "The Soviet Experience," has rightly earned wide acclaim for the group's combination of technical expertise and rich emotional palette. The middle to late Shostakovich quartets heard here were composed in the 1960s, when in the West any suggestion that music was rooted in personal "experience" was met with high academic disdain. But time has proven Shostakovich's experiences to have resonances beyond his own situation and place.