The Honolulu Chamber Music Series opens its season tonight with the Pacifica Quartet, an award-winning ensemble from the West Coast that was named for "the awe-inspiring Pacific Ocean."

The ensemble's Web site describes its musical approach through poet James Montgomery's lines: "Distinct as the billows / Yet one as the sea."

Founded in 1994, the Pacifica Quartet has recorded the complete string quartets of Felix Mendelssohn and performed the complete string quartets of Beethoven, a series of concerts called the Beethoven Cycles, in New York, California and Wisconsin. Also, as the resident string quartet for Contempo, a contemporary music organization, the Pacifica Quartet performs an annual series of concerts consisting entirely of new music.

At the Doris Duke Theatre, the Pacifica Quartet will present three quartets from these series.

The earliest is Beethoven's Opus 132 quartet in A minor from 1824-25, best known for its "Heiliger Dankgesang" ("Hymn of Thanksgiving") movement, which he composed after a serious illness. Beethoven recovered, but died a couple years later, making this one of his last works.

Beethoven's late string quartets, composed when he was fully deaf, have acquired an almost mythic reputation that changed the course of music history. Those last six string quartets were responsible in part for inspiring the ideal of composing not for the present but for posterity, an ideal that has haunted classical music for almost two centuries.

The Pacifica Quartet will also perform Mendelssohn's first quartet from 1827, Opus 13, also set in A minor and heavily influenced by Beethoven's Opus 132. Mendelssohn strove to replicate Beethoven's thematic unity, using a motive that gave the piece its nickname, "Ist es wahr?" ("Is it true?") The nickname was a quotation from one of his songs, "Frage" ("Question") from Opus 9, in which the singer asks of his beloved, "Is it true you are waiting for me … ?"

The most recent work on the program is Gyorgi Ligeti's first quartet from 1953-54, "Metamorphoses nocturnes," composed shortly before he fled Hungary's repressive political regime for Western Europe, where he was exposed to the avant garde compositional techniques that changed his style. In this first quartet, composed as a single movement with multiple sections, Ligeti transformed both a musical idea and the nocturne genre.

In addition to the Pacifica Quartet, the Honolulu Chamber Music Series will present five additional performances this season at the Doris Duke Theatre.

November features the Jupiter Quartet from the East Coast, which chose its name from the most prominent planet in the sky at the time of the quartet's formation in 2001. The Jupiter Quartet has concertized throughout the Americas, winning several awards.

In February, the series will present the Zemlinsky Quartet, a Czech ensemble formerly known as the Penguin Quartet.

Other featured performers include 22-year-old viola prodigy David Aaron Carpenter in December, the legendary pianist Leon Fleisher, now in his 80th year, in January, and baritone William Sharp with the Peabody Trio closing the season in March.