Pacifica Quartet

The Pacifica Quartet closes the 61st season of the Chamber Music Society of Salt Lake City on Friday, April 16, at Libby Gardner Concert Hall. It's a heavy program that pulls from three very different eras: Florence Price's String Quartet No. 1 in G major, György Ligeti's String Quartet No. 1, Métamorphoses nocturnes, and Beethoven's String Quartet No. 13 in B-flat major, Op. 130, followed by the Grosse Fuge, Op. 133. The whole thing runs about an hour and 40 minutes, with a 15-minute intermission in the middle.

On stage are Simin Ganatra and Austin Hartman on violin, Mark Holloway on viola, and Brandon Vamos on cello. The quartet formed in 1994 and is based in Bloomington, Indiana, where they've been the Quartet-in-Residence at Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music since 2012. They've picked up some of the top honors in chamber music along the way, including the 1998 Naumburg Chamber Music Award, the Cleveland Quartet Award, an Avery Fisher Career Grant, and several Grammy Awards.

They're known for a fearless approach to repertory and have performed at Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall, and the Kennedy Center. That side of them comes through in the program they're bringing here: Price's early 20th-century American voice, Ligeti's mid-century modernism, and Beethoven's late quartets. They've premiered works by living composers like Keeril Makan, Julia Wolfe, Shulamit Ran, and James Lee III, and have recorded the complete string quartet cycles of Carter, Mendelssohn, Shostakovich, and Beethoven. The New York Times described their playing as "engrossing, characterful... with a luminescent tranquillity and spine-tingling intensity."

The concert is at Libby Gardner Concert Hall, 1375 Presidents' Circle on the University of Utah campus, from 7:30 to 9:30 PM, with a pre-concert talk starting at 6:30 PM.