With playing that favored subtlety over raw power, the Pacifica’s sound rarely felt forced in, for instance, the playful handling of op. 18, no. 6, from Beethoven’s early period. The air of restraint, especially the narrow, elegant ribbon of first violinist Simin Ganatra’s tone, was broken only in the gutsy off-beat accents of the scherzo and the emotional polarities of the alternately gloomy and restless last movement, “La Malinconia.” Some tempo choices seemed over-ambitious, like the fast movements of op. 74, from the composer’s middle period, in which short notes in running passages were occasionally blurred or dropped.

Programming Beethoven’s last quartet on the first concert of the cycle seemed odd, akin to reading the end of a book first. After the length and contrapuntal severity of the other late quartets, however, Beethoven’s op. 135 balances a wistful slow movement, played here with a sense of yearning heartache, with some light-hearted motifs in the first and last movements. Ganatra’s tone high on the E string became shrill and off-pitch at times, but all in all this was an impressively controlled performance that bodes well for the Pacifica Quartet’s plans to perform the complete cycle next season in London and New York. A single encore stayed with Beethoven, a lyrical performance of the fifth movement (“Cavatina”) of the op. 130 string quartet.

These “middle” quartets track the composer’s journey through the explorations of the 1950s, the extremities of complexity of the 70s, to the cusp of his late late style at the end of the 80s. The Second Quartet (1959) marks a big step in the development of Carter’s musical discourse, in which the instruments embody individual expressive characters, delineated by unique musical vocabularies. The result is, to my ear, a kind of music that leans heavily on gesture rather than on theme. In this strong and expansive performance, the players of the Pacifica give the gestures of this piece the weight they need for the work to communicate its expressive content.

The Third Quartet (1971) remains one of Carter’s most complex structures, so much so that even some fans of the composer find it merely “complicated”. I like the piece quite a bit, and the performance here is a revelation—the players bring out the lines in each duo more clearly than I’ve ever heard before. I think this reading of the Quartet will cause some to take a new listen to it.

The Fourth Quartet (1986) is the most traditional piece in the cycle, at least in terms of its structure. The by-now-standard-for-Carter partitioning of musical materials between instruments is at the service of a Beethoven four movement structure. At first hearing, this is a far less vital work than the other quartets, but it grows on you, and there is much of value in it. The reading it is given by the Pacifica is strong and expressive.

The Pacifica Quartet’s follow-up to its disc of Elliott Carter’s First and Fifth Quartets [Naxos 8.559362] (4/08) finds the composer exploring the genre’s potential for conversation and confrontation. The Second Quartet (1959) sees its members as a divisive, even dysfunctional foursome—compressing the four movements while interspersing them with cadenzas in which the introspection, impulsiveness and exhibitionism of viola, cello and first violin are offset by the uniformity of the second violin. The Pacifica enter into the discourse with relish, while at times evincing Mozartian poise. The Third Quartet (1971) sets up an opposition between duos of first violin and cello, against second violin and viola in a continuous and vivid juxtaposition of movement types always meaningful in context. Adopting a degree of expressive license, the Pacifica rightly give the sheer velocity of the material its head right through to the seismic energy of the closing pages.

The Fourth Quartet (1986) can seem a retrenchment in its more equable dialogue over four outwardly traditional movements, but this does not account for a deft superimposing of elements across movements in a powerfully cumulative argument; any final “coming together” being undermined by the coda’s fragmentation. Not a work likely to yield its secrets easily, yet the Pacifica—less pressurised than the Arditti, more flexible than the Juilliard and more secure than the Composers Quartet—add appreciably to its understanding. Both sound and booklet-notes are up to the standard of the earlier disc, thus making its successor an equally indispensable acquisition.