The cancellations started pouring in back in mid-March and continued through the summer and into the fall, which the Indiana-based Pacifica Quartet had fully expected.
But like their classical music colleagues worldwide, they started getting invitations for virtual concerts to replace the in-person concerts they had been set to play before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down stages worldwide.
βI think whatever works right now as long as audiences can listen and we get to play,β Pacifica cellist Brandon Vamos said last week from Bloomington, Indiana, where the quartet is in residence at Indiana University. βWe miss being in a live audience because you feed off of that, but itβs given us a reason to continue working on this great repertoire and stay motivated.β
Most of the concerts the quartet are doing, including one on Saturday, Dec. 19, for the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music, are prerecorded. The group has done one livestreamed concert for a presenter in Syracuse, which Vamos said βfelt like it was more in the moment.β But technology issues are the biggest hurdle for livestreaming.
βWhen you do the recordings, I think you can take a little more care of the sound,β he explained.
The recent performances come after the quartet spent months βkeeping to ourselvesβ in isolation and lockdown courtesy of the global pandemic, Vamos said. When everything shut down in mid-March, the quartet, like their colleagues at the University of Arizonaβs Fred Fox School of Music, took their classes to Zoom. In May, when conditions started to improve, they began rehearsing in an open garage, socially distanced and masked.
And they finished recording βContemporary Voices,β a collection of works written for them by American composers Shulamit Ran, Jennifer Higdon and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. They are works, Vamos said, that he and his colleagues would like to see become part of the quartet repertoire.
The album was released in September and was recently nominated for the 2021 Grammy for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance.
Vamos said the nomination took the ensemble by surprise.
βYouβre not prepared for that, and I wasnβt even thinking of it as a possibility so that was nice,β he said.
The Tucson performance of Beethoven quartets, part of the Friends virtual fall season, was filmed two weeks ago at Indiana Universityβs Auer Hall. It is the first time Pacifica Quartet has played a Friends concert since they teamed up with classical guitarist Sharon Isbin for a Friends recital in 2017.
