-April 2008 By Brian Wise Indeed, to call Carter's five string quartets daunting (and, frankly, unfashionable) is to labour the obvious. Even so, highly skilled young ensembles continue to rise to their challenge. Most notable is the Pacifica Quartet, which has made a specialty of Carter and gave a marathon reading of the full quartet cycle at the New York Society for Ethical Culture (30 January). Since the Pacifica last played the cycle in New York, at Miller Theater in 2002, it has had time to live with these works and gradually absorb their inner workings. Each piece here had an identity of its own: the First Quartet became a grand, 45-minute struggle between four very distinct parts; the Second was the most exasperatingly dense; the Third featured two "battling" duets; the Fourth had a strong sense of organic momentum; and the Fifth offered an undercurrent of wit beneath all the minute variants of timbre. One standout moment came early in the First Quartet, when the viola and cello engage in vigorous recitative answered by soft duet between the muted violins. The players both stood and sat in different configurations throughout the evening. In nearly three hours, their concentration did not flag, and, judging from the full hall (which developed only a few empty seats along the way), seldom did that of the listeners.