Simin Ganatra and Kyu-Young Kim, violins

Kathryn Lockwood, viola

Brandon Vamos, cello

With a career spanning three decades, the multiple Grammy Award-winning Pacifica Quartet has achieved international recognition as one of the finest chamber music ensembles performing today. Formed in 1994, the Quartet was named the winner of the 1998 Naumburg Chamber Music Award. In 2002 the ensemble was honored with Chamber Music America's Cleveland Quartet Award and the appointment to Lincoln Center's The Bowers Program, and in 2006 was awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant.

The Quartet is known for its virtuosity, exuberant performance style, and often-daring repertory choices. Having served as quartet-in-residence at Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music for more than a decade, the Quartet was also previously the quartet-in-residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2021, the Pacifica Quartet received a second Grammy Award for Contemporary Voices, an exploration of music by three Pulitzer Prize-winning composers: Shulamit Ran, Jennifer Higdon, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich.

The Pacifica Quartet has proven itself the preeminent interpreter of string quartet cycles. Having given acclaimed performances of the complete Carter cycle in San Francisco, New York, Chicago and Houston; the Mendelssohn cycle in Napa, Australia, New York and Pittsburgh; and the Beethoven cycle in New York, Denver, St. Paul, Chicago, Napa and Tokyo, the Quartet presented the monumental Shostakovich cycle in Chicago, New York, Montreal and London's Wigmore Hall. The Quartet has been widely praised for these cycles, with critics calling the concerts, "brilliant," "astonishing," "gripping," and "breathtaking."

An ardent advocate of contemporary music, the Pacifica Quartet commissions and performs many new works including those by Keeril Makan, Julia Wolfe, and Shulamit Ran, the latter in partnership with the Music Accord consortium, London's Wigmore Hall, and Tokyo's Suntory Hall. The work -- entitled Glitter, Doom, Shands, Memory -- had its New York debut as part of the Chamber Music Society at Lincoln Center series.

In 2008 the Quartet released its Grammy Award-winning recording of Carter's Quartets Nos. 1 and 5 on the Naxos label; the 2009 release of Quartets Nos. 2, 3 and 4 completed the two-CD set. Cedille Records released the groups four-CD recordings of the entire Shostakovich cycle, paired with other contemporary Soviet works. Other recording projects include Leo Ornstein's rarely heard piano quintet with Marc-Andre Hamlin with an accompanying tour, the Brahms piano quintet with pianist Menahem Pressler, the Brahms and Mozart clarinet quintets with clarinetist Anthony McGill, and their Grammy Award-winning Contemporary Voice album.

The current members of the Pacifica Quartet -- Simin Ganatra and Austin Hartman, violins; Mark Holloway, viola and Brandon Vamos, cello -- live in Bloomington, IN where the serve as quartet-in-residence and full-time faculty members at Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music. Prior to their appointment, the Quartet was on the faculty of the University of Illinois at Champaign Urbana from 2003- 2012, and also served as resident performing artist at the University of Chicago for seventeen years.

Naumburg Concert

Pacifica Quartet -- Simin Ganatra and Kyu-Young Kim, violins; Kathryn Lockwood, viola and Brandon Vamos, cello

March 9, 1999, Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, New York, NY

Program

Mendelssohn: Quartet in E minor, Op. 44, No. 2

Jennifer Higdon: Voices (1993)

Beethoven: Quartet in C Major, Op. 59, No. 3

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‍Excerpt, Music Review, The New York Times, March 1, 1999

When A Group's Togetherness Pays Off

"The Pacifica Quartet, formed in Los Angeles but now based in Chicago, made an excellent showing at its Naumburg Award recital on Tuesday at Alice Tully Hall. Its sound individually and as a group, is pure, lyrical and educated. Balance is good and clear, and the musicians' consistency in matters of tempo is remarkable. They all move on the same strong, supple band of time." Paul Griffiths

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