With Pacifica, Carter is easy on the ears

Elliott Carter.

That name alone still provokes feelings of intimidation and even fear, the composer of brainy, uncompromisingly dissonant, often incredibly complex string quartets that seem to represent everything minimalism was rebelling against. It was once thought that an attentive ear could take only one of these works at a time; anything more would fry your circuits.

Well, a remarkable thing happened at UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall on Saturday night. The young, skilled, apparently fearless Pacifica Quartet took on the entire cycle of five Carter quartets in one evening -- and lo, there was no ear fatigue, just a sense of exhilaration.

In hearing the entire cycle live, with two short intermission breaks, you can picture Carter’s evolution over nearly half a century (1951-1995) as one mighty arch -- just like the Bartok quartet cycle.

In some ways, the Quartet No. 1 is the one Bartok never got around to writing, where Carter takes up the thread from Bartok’s acerbic middle quartets -- with a brief injection of American jazz syncopations. With the Quartet No. 2, Carter starts to pick the ensemble apart, even suggesting that the players sit farther apart from each other, and by the Quartet No. 3 -- the radical apogee of the arch -- he divides the quartet into two badgering, arguing duos.

In the Quartet No. 4, the musicians’ chairs are back together and Carter tries to reconcile their differences, while the Quartet No. 5 tones it down further, with sparer, enigmatic textures. Yet even in his late 80s -- he’s now 94 -- Carter could give musicians fits. Take one stretch in the middle of the Quartet No. 5 when each instrument plays in a different meter yet still has to begin and end at the same time, bar after bar after bar.

This was only the third time that the Pacifica had done the entire cycle; New York heard it in November, Chicago last month. Yet they played as if they had been performing the cycle for decades, linking the connections between the works and digging deeply into their musical values. In many passages, they were able to bring something to Carter that earlier interpreters like the Juilliard Quartet couldn’t deal with -- a generously lyrical, even cantabile feeling that humanized the music, even while giving other passages their full ferocious due.

The plushness of the Pacifica’s collective tone, coupled with its youthful intensity, may well be the ideal combination that finally catapults Carter’s quartets into the mainstream.