(Extracted from longer article.)
The Rose Studio at Lincoln Center was jockey-for-seats full for the Chamber Music Society’s five-hour symposium and master class with the Pacifica Quartet coaching the Laurel Quartet. Among the speakers was Robert Mann, founding violinist of the Juilliard Quartet, who observed, “No matter how complicated it is, it always sounds right to me.”

With Alice Tully Hall under renovation, the Pacifica Quartet played their marathon evening of Carter’s five string quartets (which span 50 years) at the Society for Ethical Culture, a serviceable if seedy substitute. The Pacifica pioneered this cycle the way the Emerson did Bartok’s quartets, the Manhattan Quartet did Shostakovich’s, and the Kronos Quartet did Morton Feldman’s six-hour Quartet No. 2.

Pacifica has a new recording of Carter’s quartets on the Naxos label. They were all Chamber Music Society firsts. The rapt audience, an almost-full house of older listeners, discussed the concert using words like “tender” and “pure”, but no one would argue against “experimental”.

In the dramatic Quartet No. 2, each instrument leads a movement, which may contain a lively running passage, a grand silence, or a single drawn-out soft note. In the third and most radical quartet, two duos lead separate lives in parallel worlds. In this performance the players stood where they could see one another, removing the need for a conductor (there was one at the premiere). By No. 4 (1986) each instrument participates in its own way.