Pacifica Quartet

The Met’s Grammy-winning quartet-in-residence continues its series of Beethoven string quartets with a triptych culled from the master’s early, middle, and late periods. The program opens with Quartet No. 3, and with an uncharacteristically subdued lyricism, it had the pathos and compositional inevitability to forecast a new development in the form that remains unsurpassed. Quartet No. 12, composed from the depths of total deafness, is one of most harmonically complex and fully realized in the Beethoven canon. The evening culminates with Quartet No. 9, the third in the Razumovsky cycle, which provides a rare glimpse into another plane of existence.

Sat., Nov. 12, 7 p.m., 2011