The Pacifica Quartet appears this season across North America and abroad, including a world premiere tour of their newest program, American Portraits, with Oscar-nominated film icon Sigourney Weaver in New York, Washington, D.C., and London. American Portraits is centered on two world-premiere commissions for narrator and string quartet – champion of justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is celebrated by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Jennifer Higdon, and environmental trailblazer Rachel Carson by GRAMMY® nominee Gabriela Lena Frank. The 2025-2026 season also brings the Pacifica Quartet to ArtPower at the University of California, San Diego; the Oneppo Chamber Music Series at Yale University; the Calgary Pro Musica Society; Friends of Music; Hillsdale College; Kutztown University Presents; the Eureka Chamber Music Series; and the Linton Chamber Music Series. 

Formed in 1994, the Pacifica Quartet quickly rose to prominence, winning chamber music’s top competitions, including the 1998 Naumburg Chamber Music Award. In 2002, the ensemble received Chamber Music America’s Cleveland Quartet Award and was named to Lincoln Center’s Bowers Program (formerly CMS Two). Four years later, it received the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant, affirming its position among the foremost American quartets. 

An ardent advocate for living composers, the Pacifica Quartet has commissioned and premiered works by Keeril Makan, Julia Wolfe, Shulamit Ran, and James Lee III. The Pacifica Quartet has also proven itself to be the preeminent interpreter of string quartet cycles, harnessing the group’s singular focus and incredible stamina to portray each composer’s evolution, often over the course of just a few days. 

The ensemble’s GRAMMY® Award-winning recordings of Elliott Carter’s Quartets Nos. 1-5 on Naxos and the complete Shostakovich cycle on Cedille Records – praised by The Telegraph as “nothing short of phenomenal” – are now reference points for those repertoires. Other notable collaborations include Leo Ornstein’s Piano Quintet with Marc-André Hamelin, the Brahms Piano Quintet with Menahem Pressler, and the Brahms and Mozart Clarinet Quintets with Anthony McGill. Their most recent GRAMMY®-winning album, Contemporary Voices (Cedille Records), showcases works by Shulamit Ran, Jennifer Higdon, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. A second recording with Anthony McGill, American Stories, featured world premiere recordings by Richard Danielpour, James Lee III, and Ben Shirley, as well as a piece by Valerie Coleman, and was nominated for a 2024 GRAMMY® Award. 

Based in Bloomington, Indiana, the Pacifica Quartet has served as full-time faculty and Quartet-in-Residence at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music since 2012. They previously held residencies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2003-2012), the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2009-2012), and the University of Chicago, where they served as resident performing artists for 17 years. 

For more information, please visit www.pacificaquartet.com.