Quartet embraces the vibe of playing in a club

The Pacifica Quartet will perform tonight at the Regattabar, the first concert in a joint series between the Longy School of Music and the club.

Another week, another talented young string quartet in town. Gotta love life in the big city.

The Pacifica Quartet is finishing the first of three years in residency at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge. Tonight its members leave Longy's confines for a gig at the nearby Regattabar, in the Charles Hotel, the first concert in a joint series between the school and the club.

For quartets, playing such nontraditional venues is becoming strangely . . . traditional these days. Soon, perhaps, the really radical gambit for chamber groups will be to play standard repertoire in traditional concert halls.

Trends aside, the Pacifica members appreciate the way a bar's intimate dimensions and casual vibe help break down the barrier between players and listeners. "Quartets are always great to hear in intimate settings," said first violinist Simin Ganatra by phone this week, on the way to LaGuardia Airport after a New York gig. "You have more interaction with the audience. We can have a more relaxed atmosphere and hopefully get people in who wouldn't normally go to a string quartet concert. People of our generation, especially, are a little afraid of going into a concert hall - they feel like they might get stuck there."

The Pacifica - whose members are on the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where the quartet is also in residence - has built its reputation largely on its prowess in modern and contemporary fare, and in particular the music of Elliott Carter. The quartet's latest CD (on Naxos) features superbly confident performances of Carter's First and Fifth quartets. On numerous occasions they have played all five of the quartets in a single program, a feat not only of endurance and technical skill but of musical discernment.

"We love his music," Ganatra said, and given the reputation of Carter's music for inaccessibility, the sentiment packs a real punch. Playing all the quartets at a stretch "really shows his development as a composer. His music does change, and as a listener, you start to see his development. And it's fun to be able to track that."

Their R-Bar program features more familiar repertoire, bringing in some Longy guests. Faculty pianist Wayman Chin joins them for the first movement of the Dvorak Piano Quintet, and four graduate students sit in on the first movement of the Mendelssohn Octet.

Just to shake things up, the program also features the premiere of Longy composer John Morrison's arrangement of the Allman Brothers' "Whipping Post," more classic than which classic rock does not get. "It works great for a string quartet," says Ganatra. "I think it'll be really fun for the audience to hear."

The program note mentions that Morrison's piece is an adaptation of the studio recording of the song, from the first Allman Brothers album, not the epic, 23-minute version recorded at the Fillmore East in 1971. Anyone hoping to hear a transcription of one of those lengthy Duane Allman guitar solos, Ganatra said, will come away empty-handed.

The concert will be simulcast and archived on the website banddirector.com.

617-395-7757, regattabarjazz.com

Harbison's busy week

Next week will be an eventful one for composer John Harbison, literally. No less than three world premieres will take place. On Sunday the New England Conservatory Percussion Ensemble will premiere "Cortège," and on Tuesday the NEC Contemporary Ensemble gives the first performance of the chamber version of "Milosz Songs," an orchestral song cycle first played in 2006. Finally, on Thursday, the Boston Symphony Orchestra premieres his Fifth Symphony, for mezzo-soprano, baritone, and orchestra, under James Levine.

Thematic links run from the symphony to each of the other works. Poet Czeslaw Milosz provides texts both for the song cycle and for the symphony, whose first two movements are a setting of the lengthy poem "Orpheus and Eurydice." And a generally mournful bearing is shared by "Cortège," a memorial for composer Donald Sur, and the symphony, which Harbison's program note describes as a "meditation on loss." That connects it to its companion on the BSO program: Mahler's "Das Lied von der Erde," one of the most poignant reflections on death ever composed.

As if that weren't enough, Harbison is also conducting Emmanuel Music's performance of Bach's Mass in B Minor tomorrow night.

bso.org, concerts.newenglandconservatory.edu, emmanuelmusic.org

Holloway on violin

Late in 2006, the ECM label released a fine recording of Bach's Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin by John Holloway, playing on a baroque violin. Curiously, the set went largely unnoticed, perhaps because the world was still caught up in the excitement surrounding Gidon Kremer's widely lauded accounts of these works, released on the same label the previous year.

Hearing the two side by side makes for a fascinating juxtaposition. Where Kremer's playing is all extroverted drama, Holloway favors a more self-effacing, mysterious approach. Kremer tends to slash at Bach's chords with an almost violent attack. Holloway's touch is lighter, and the baroque violin's airier timbre allows clarity even in dense textures. Tempos generally remain consistent throughout movements, and there is a real sense of dance in some of the faster movements. If Kremer is the passionate existentialist in these works, Holloway is the Cartesian rationalist, flirting with darkness just long enough to find a cogent, logical outcome.

Holloway, cellist Jaap ter Linden, and harpsichordist Lars Ulrik Mortensen play music of Veracini, Vivaldi, Corelli, and others tomorrow in a Boston Early Music Festival concert at First Church in Cambridge, Congregational. 617-661-1812, bemf.org