The 92nd Street Y, New York (92NY), one of New York’s leading cultural venues, presents the Pacifica Quartet on Wednesday, November 13, 2024 at 7:30pm ET on the David Geffen Stage at Kaufmann Concert Hall and streaming online. Tickets start at $25 and are available at https://www.92ny.org/event/pacifica-quartet.

The Grammy® Award-winning Pacifica Quartet returns to the 92NY stage to perform American Snapshots: “JFK, Vietnam, and Ellis Island”, a reflective program shaped around three pivotal chapters in American history. Opening with Barber’s String Quartet in B Minor (that includes his moving Adagio for Strings), this first musical snapshot gives listeners the opportunity to reflect on November 25, 1963, when the Adagio for Strings brought a cathartic calm to a grieving nation as conducted by Toscanini at JFK’s funeral. The second American snapshot is George Crumb’s revolutionary work Black Angels “Thirteen Images from the Dark Land” that features an amplified string quartet, crystal glasses, thimbles, a glass stirring rod, and two suspended tam-tam gongs. Written as a threnody (ode or lament) to the Vietnam War in 1970, Black Angels was unforgettably championed by the Kronos Quartet and conceived as “a kind of parable on our troubled contemporary world” (Crumb 1971). The final snapshot points to the American immigrant experience, inspiring composers like Dvořák to create new styles and sounds based on America’s rich musical landscape. From the song of the scarlet tanager to musical cadences of the African American spiritual, we experience the substantial impact of Dvořák’s visit to Spillville, Iowa where he wrote his beloved “American” String Quartet.