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Every few years, the award-winning Pacifica Quartet stages a musical marathon. Over a single season, violinists Sibbi Bernhardsson and Simin Ganatra, violist Masumi Per Rostad and cellist Brandon Vamos immerse themselves in one composer's complete works for string quartet. Elliott Carter, Mendelssohn and Beethoven have all been featured. This season, beginning with shows here Sunday and Oct. 31, Shostakovich will be the focus.

"You get a portrait of the composer,'' said Rostad, who joined the Pacifica in 2001. "When you work through a body of work that spans a significant amount of time in a composer's life, you really get a sense of their perspective. I always feel that at the end of a cycle, we know the composer, the person a little bit more intimately."

Now based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Pacifica hardly played it safe by choosing Carter for its first in-depth series in 2002-03. Carter writes formidably knotty music, though it is spiced with effervescent spirits.

But when the Pacifica was planning its 2002-03 season, concert presenters were wary. A full evening of works by a living composer with a reputation for writing difficult music- Guaranteed box-office poison.

"It was really difficult because nobody wanted them,'' Rostad said. "But we felt very strongly about the music. It was a kind of bull-headedness."

Rostad recalled that his mother had attended an all-Carter evening in New York a year or two before the Pacifica's Nov. 2, 2002, concert there. Both concerts were at Columbia University's Miller Theatre. She was among 20 or 30 people in the venue, which seats close to 700.

"We got lucky," he said. "People actually came to the concert. We packed the hall." No doubt the Pacifica's reputation as a hot, award-winning, fearsomely passionate ensemble helped sell tickets.

Shostakovich, whose 15 string quartets rank alongside Beethoven's 18 as pinnacles of the genre, was a logical choice. The Pacifica will perform his quartets in roughly chronological order over five concerts this season. The cycle will continue through February in Chicago and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where the group is quartet in residence.

String quartets offer an extraordinarily personal glimpse of a composer's personality, Rostad said. This is particularly true of Shostakovich, whose operas and symphonies were fiercely criticized by Soviet authorities, including Stalin.

"Composers have a lot more freedom writing for string quartet than for large orchestra,'' he said. "It's not out there in the public spectrum. When you put out a symphony, it's out there for the larger world to examine. [Writing string quartets] allowed Shostakovich to take things out of the limelight."

(The Pacifica's Shostakovich cycle is part of the Soviet Arts Experience, a 16-month series of events that involves 25 local groups.)

Shostakovich has been in the Pacifica Quartet's repertoire for years. But the ensemble's picture of the composer is evolving.

"We've all got emerging pictures of Shostakovich,'' he said. "We're all going on a journey together -- us plus the audience -- over the course of this year. It's going to be interesting."