Pacifica Quartet


The Pacifica Quartet is a professional string quartet based in Bloomington, Indiana. Its members are: Simin Ganatra, first violin; Austin Hartman, second violin; Mark Holloway, viola; and Brandon Vamos, cello. Formed in 1994 by Ganatra and Vamos with violinist Sibbi Bernhardsson and violist Kathryn Lockwood, the group won prizes in competitions such as the 1996 Coleman Chamber Music Competition, the 1997 Concert Artists Guild Competition, and the 1998 Naumburg Chamber Music Competition. In 2001, violist Masumi Per Rostad replaced Lockwood. The group subsequently received Chamber Music America's prestigious Cleveland Quartet Award in 2002, the Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2006, and was named "Ensemble of the Year" by Musical America in 2009. In 2017, violinist Austin Hartman replaced Bernhardsson and violist Guy Ben-Ziony replaced Rostad.
The Pacifica Quartet tours throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia. The ensemble is known for its traversal of the complete string cycles of a single composer, and in recent years have toured and recorded the quartets of Elliott Carter, Mendelssohn, Beethoven and Shostakovich.
Currently the ensemble serves as Quartet-in-Residence and full-time faculty at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University in Bloomington. The members of the Pacifica Quartet are also Resident Performing Artists at the University of Chicago and were previously the Quartet-in-Residence at the University of Illinois School of Music from 2003 to 2012.

History

The Pacifica Quartet was formed in 1994 in southern California. Simin Ganatra and Sibbi Bernhardsson were both students of well-known pedagogues Roland and Almita Vamos, whose son is cellist Brandon Vamos. Sibbi moved from Iceland to the Chicago area to study with the Vamoses. Two members of the Pacifica Quartet – Ganatra and Vamos - graduated from the Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio. The quartet's original personnel included Ganatra, Vamos, and violist Kathryn Lockwood. In 1997, Sibbi Bernhardsson collaborated with violist Masumi Per Rostad at Yale School of Music's Norfolk Chamber Music Festival. Rostad was subsequently invited to join the Pacifica Quartet a few years later, shortly after Lockwood's departure in 2001. At the end of the 2016–2017 season, Austin Hartman replaced Bernhardsson and Guy Ben-Ziony replaced Rostad.

Members

The Pacifica Quartet gained international recognition as an interpreter of string quartet cycles. They have given performances of the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Elliott Carter's cycle in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Edinburgh and London; the Mendelssohn cycle in Atherton, Pittsburgh, as well as cities in Australia and Germany; and the Beethoven cycle in New York, Denver, St. Paul, Chicago, Napa, and Tokyo. The Quartet presented the complete cycle of fifteen quartets by Dmitri Shostakovich in Chicago and New York during the 2010–2011 season and in Montreal and at London's Wigmore Hall in the 2011–2012 season.

The Soviet Experience

"The Soviet Experience" was a fourteen-month-long multidisciplinary festival that took place in Chicago, IL during the 2010/11 season. Spearheaded by Shauna Quill, Executive Director of University of Chicago Presents, the festival was inspired by the Pacifica Quartet's plan to perform all fifteen of Dmitri Shostakovich's string quartets in Chicago, the first time the city hosted the entire cycle.
Eleven different institutions collaborated to present works by visual artists, choreographers, composers, and dramatists who lived under the Politburo of the Soviet Union in more than 48 events in a dozen venues across Chicago, making it one of the largest inter-disciplinary collaborative efforts in Chicago since the Silk Road Chicago project in 2006/07. In addition to five concerts during the season, the Pacifica Quartet gave master classes and free noon-time lecture demonstrations throughout the festival.

Awards and recognition

In 2011, Boston's WGBH radio started hosting violist Masumi Per Rostad's series of podcasts, Inner Voice. Often recorded in the far-flung locales where chamber music is presented, the podcasts take one behind the scenes in conversations with fellow musicians and insiders from the world of classical music and offer a sense of what it is like to be on the road as a touring musician today.