HoustonChronicle Pacifica shows its traditional side February 12, 2003 By Charles Ward The Pacifica Quartet, which is making news this season with its performances of the five string quartets by the great American contemporary composer Elliott Carter, assembled a much more traditional program for its latest Houston recital. The composers' names were familiar -- Dvorák, Shostakovich and Beethoven -- but the repertoire illustrated once more how the familiar can be fresh. The Pacifica made its impact by winning several important chamber-music competitions within four years of its formation. Now resident at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago, it plays a wide-ranging schedule and repertoire through which the ensemble is gathering much acclaim. The group presented a gorgeously played program Tuesday that was thoroughly stimulating in a Houston Friends of Music presentation at Rice University. It opened with three of the 12 movements from Dvorák's Cypresses, an arrangement he made in 1887 using parts of a large song cycle composed in 1865. Each of the three movements darted briskly through changes in style and emotion, as settings of song texts often do, but overall the Pacifica suggested a temperament of great sweetness. The mood turned tangy with Shostakovich's Piano Quintet, Op. 57, with Ursula Oppens as the pianist. Written in 1940, between the brutal Stalinist purges and Russia's entry into World War II, the work is straightforward for Shostakovich. Characteristic big sweeps of emotions like sighing sorrow and sardonic wit were present, but their impact was softened by the work's strong tonality. Oppens and the Pacifica played with chaste passion; in the fugue of the second movement, the balance of formal rigor and emotional intensity was very exciting. The emotions were intense yet crisp because of the gorgeous sound and sharp-edged intelligence that characterized the Pacifica's playing all evening. Beethoven's Quartet in A Minor, Op. 132 (1825) comes from the large group of late string quartets notable for intellectual rigor, emotional intensity and curiosity. Developed out of a simple, chromatic four-note motive, Op. 132, with five movements, was highly personal, written during a period of illness. (The third movement is titled "Hymn of thanksgiving to the divinity, from a convalescent, in the Lydian mode.") The drone that opens the middle part of the second movement, the choralelike theme of the third and vigorous march of the fourth suggest the range of the moods. The rising peaks that cap several movements attest to the restlessness characteristic of much of Beethoven's late music. In performing the late quartets, some groups press so hard to express Beethoven's vision that the coherence and beauty of the music is nearly lost. In contrast, the Pacifica played with unerring consistency, balancing intensity with control to produce a deeply probing yet totally handsome interpretation. At Tuesday's concert, the Friends of Music announced its nine-concert 2003-2004 season. The Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio will open it on Sept. 16. The visiting string quartets will be the Juilliard, Leipzig, Emerson, American and Guarneri. The King's Singers, Eastman Brass and Eroica Trio will round out the lineup. For information, call 713-348-5400. (c) 2003 Houston Chronicle