Contemporary Voices
Pacifica Quartet, Otis Murphy (saxophone)
Awards:
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The Times Records of the Year, 2020
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Grammy Awards, 63rd Awards (2021), Winner - Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance
This phenomenally interesting music is performed to the very highest standards and recorded in fine sound.
Contemporary Voices
Pacifica Quartet, Otis Murphy (saxophone)
Purchase product
Awards:
-
The Times Records of the Year, 2020
-
Grammy Awards, 63rd Awards (2021), Winner - Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance
This phenomenally interesting music is performed to the very highest standards and recorded in fine sound.
About
The Grammy Award-winning Pacifica Quartet performs works by three Pulitzer Prize-winning contemporary composers: Shulamit Ran, Jennifer Higdon, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich.Written for the Pacifica and receiving its world-premiere recording, Ran’s Glitter, Doom, Shards, Memory — String Quartet No. 3 is a moving tribute to painter Felix Nussbaum, who perished in Auschwitz in 1944. Higdon’s Voices, dedicated to the Pacifica, evokes explosive energy, otherworldly calm, and spiritual serenity. In Zwilich’s Quintet for Alto Saxophone and String Quartet, a lusciously singing saxophone shares the spotlight with virtuosic string playing. The Pacifica, quartet in-residence at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, partner with their IU colleague, renowned classical saxophonist Otis Murphy.
Contents and tracklist
Awards and reviews
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The Times Records of the Year2020
Nov/Dec 2020
This phenomenally interesting music is performed to the very highest standards and recorded in fine sound.
March/April 2021
The Pacifica Quartet display the same standards of ensemble and concentration that made their Shostakovich cycle so successful. Saxophonist Otis Murphy has an engaging tonal quality of great warmth, even in the turbulent second movement of Zwilich’s piece. I greatly enjoyed getting to know these works, all three of which deserve to maintain an ongoing life in the quartet repertoire. Highly recommended.
19th June 2020
The American string quartet presents three vivid works written for them. Ran’s Glitter, Doom, Shards, Memory (her third string quartet) is an acutely felt memorial to the painter Felix Nussbaum, who died in Auschwitz...Otis Murphy joins them for Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s attractive Quintet for Alto Saxophone and String Quartet, and blends in uncannily well.
