Alongside the violin, cello or piano, the viola is commonly underrated or overlooked. But for Masumi Per Rostad, the viola is golden.
“I started out as a violin player when I was 4,” said the youngest member of the Pacifica Quartet that returns to Colorado for performances in Fort Collins and Denver next week. “But when I was 12, I picked up a viola. I’m a larger guy, so it fit me better physically and I fell in love with the role of the viola in an ensemble.
“Because the outer voices, the first violin and cello, are the most acoustically apparent, the ear is not immediately drawn to the middle voices, the second violin and the viola. But if you train your ear to those inner voices, you can tell the sophistication – or lack thereof – of a composer’s control of harmonic language. Without those inner voices, you don’t get the shade or the necessary meaning behind the harmonic progressions of a piece.
“Mozart and Haydn really understood that … and when they performed together, they fought over who gets to play the viola.”
Rostad, 29, describes the youthful quartet – including second violinist Sibbi Bernhardsson, first violinist Simin Ganatra and cellist Brandon Vamos, who are married to each other – as close-knit.
“First and foremost, we’re friends,” he said. “Ours is a relationship like any other. We all need individual space at times, and yet there’s only about six or seven days between now and September that we won’t all be together. So you learn skills to stay healthy and respect each other’s need for time alone and pursuing other interests.”
“Sometimes, when we’re on tour, we’ll go running together which makes us all feel healthier. It’s also good when we have a chance to play outside the ensemble occasionally.”
Rostad further notes the quartet’s breadth of repertoire as a key differentiator from other ensembles.
“We don’t really make a distinction between periods of music,” he said. “There’s just great music and music that’s not so great. So for us, planning a program is very complicated. … We select specific pieces we want to play and then we work really hard to make an effective program by how we combine them.
“In Denver, our program has a lot of variety. We’re playing Mendelssohn and Carter, pieces we’ve really lived for a long time. We recently recorded all the Mendelssohn quartets and we’ve toured the complete cycle of Carter quartets. Next year, we’re recording the complete cycle of Beethoven quartets.”
All that hard work hasn’t gone unnoticed. The Pacifica – in residence at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana and at the University of Chicago – made the cover of the April 2006 edition of Gramophone magazine as “one of the finest and most energetic quartets of the younger generation,” praised for its consistent championing of new music.
“Our approach toward music follows the lines of an hourglass,” said Rostad. “After we’ve all learned our individual parts in a piece, we read it through to get a broad sense of it and how we relate to it collectively.
“Then, we narrow it down for some really detailed work. But then we broaden it again to be flexible for a dialogue with the audience. Sometimes you can hear or see the audience, or even sense how the audience is breathing. All of that affects our performance.”
Performance schedule
The Pacifica Quartet will perform in Fort Collins and Denver next week:
FORT COLLINS|Felix Mendelssohn’s String Quartet No. 1 in E-flat major, Op. 12; Leos Janácek’s String Quartet No. 2; Bedrich Smetana’s String Quartet No. 1 in E minor; Edna Rizley Griffin Concert Hall, CSU University Center for the Arts, 1400 Remington St., 7:30 p.m. Tuesday|$12-$22|970-221-6735 or fcgov.com/lctix
DENVER|Felix Mendelssohn’s String Quartet No. 1 in E-flat major, Op. 12; Elliott Carter’s String Quartet No. 1 and Bedrich Smetana’s String Quartet No. 1 in E minor; Gates Concert Hall, Newman Center for the Performing Arts, 2344 E. Iliff Ave., 7:30 p.m., Wednesday|
SOLD OUT|303-388-9839 or friendsofchambermusic.com
