Part One: This part of the story begins in 2007, when I first heard a very young quartet group, the Vertigo Quartet, play Shostakovich’s Twelfth. I had heard all fifteen Shostakovich quartets in a cycle played the year before, during his centennial, and had loved them, but it was not until I heard the Vertigos’ rendering of the Twelfth that I decided to write a book about the composer and his quartets. I got in touch with the four young members of the Vertigo Quartet—all recent Curtis Institute graduates—and asked if I could talk with them about their attitudes toward that composer, and they kindly agreed. As a result, they appeared in my book, Music for Silenced Voices, even though the quartet group they played in had dissolved by the time the book came out.
The other three players dispersed all over the world, but the cellist, Nicholas Canellakis, became part of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and also appeared frequently at Music@Menlo—two places where I could follow his career, which I proceeded to do. Whenever he saw me at one of his concerts, he would greet me as “the Shostakovich lady,” and I soon began attending concerts purely to hear him play, for he had become a very fine cellist indeed. Earlier this month, on August 2, I went down to Menlo Park to hear him play in two great pieces, the Brahms Piano Quintet and Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, in the last Music@Menlo program of the season. In both cases, Nick (as I have come to think of him) was superb.
Part Two: This part of the story begins even farther back—possibly as early as 2000 or 2001—when I first became aware of a quartet group called the Pacifica Quartet. The first thing I heard them play was Beethoven—at a Columbia noon concert series, I believe—and then, in 2010, I also began listening to their Shostakovich. At that point I reached out to them behind the scenes, and when they played the full Shostakovich cycle at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, during the 2010-11 season, I was invited to appear with them at each concert, talking with one or more of the players about the quartets they were about to perform. Later we met up at Shostakovich concerts in Illinois and California, and ultimately I even joined them for a five-day appearance in Montreal, where we again did our joint Shostakovich routine. I became very attached to all four members of that quartet, and especially to the violist, Masumi Per Rostad, so I was a little disheartened to learn last year that he had left the Pacificas to take up an excellent post at the Eastman School of Music.
But recently, at that same concert where I heard Nick Canellakis play in the Brahms and the Schoenberg, I got news of Masumi Per Rostad. I learned from Milina Barry (whom I’d met because she was the PR person for both the Pacificas and Music@Menlo) that Masumi had gone freelance as a performer and was playing all over the country in various summer festivals. I was able to locate him, then, at a forthcoming concert in my general neighborhood (if you count the Napa Valley as part of Berkeley’s neighborhood), and so I instantly acquired a ticket to his end-of-August performance at Music in the Vineyards — a venue where I’d heard him many times when he was still with the Pacificas.
Part Three: Okay, here is where the serendipity comes in. I noticed that Nick Canellakis was also scheduled to play that weekend at Music in the Vineyards. Great, I thought, two for the price of one! Since I was going to be away for the rest of the weekend, I could only go to the last performance of the season, on Sunday, August 26, which happened to feature Schumann’s Piano Quintet, one of my favorite pieces. The program didn’t say which works Masumi and Nick were scheduled to participate in (there were other cellists and violists involved in the concert), but I knew I’d get a chance to hear each of them play at least once.
The August 26 concert was held in the elegant upstairs cask room of the gorgeous Inglenook Winery, a vineyard that is now owned and run by Coppola family—perhaps the most comfortable and acoustically intimate of the spaces I’ve been to at Music in the Vineyards. As I came up the stairs to check in, I heard a group rehearsing in the performance space—and when I peeked behind the curtain, I saw that it included both Nick and Masumi. But what they were playing was not the Schumann, but Brahms’s Third Piano Quartet, which had been on the agenda for the Saturday night but had been relocated to Sunday for personnel reasons. As it turned out, my two favorites had not been scheduled to play together in the Schumann (which had been done the night before, with neither Masumi nor Nick), but they were both scheduled for the Brahms, along with the fine violinist Axel Strauss and the incredibly talented pianist Michael Brown. So if things had gone the way they should have gone, I wouldn’t have heard them play together. “What luck!” I said to the man arranging the seats onstage when I learned about the switch. “Or fate,” he said. Indeed.
The Brahms Op. 60 that emerged that evening was truly one of the most wonderful chamber performances I have ever heard. The four musicians managed to merge their rhythms and styles in ways that are rare for festival groupings: it felt more as if they had been playing together for a long time, though with the kind of added excitement that can come from a sudden encounter with a thrilling new partner. The quartet seemed designed, in particular, to showcase Nick’s and Masumi’s talents, with the extraordinarily moving cello solo in the Andante movement and the heart-stopping passages on the viola in the Finale—not to mention the sudden shifts between pizzicato and bowing, between slowness and speed, between louder and softer passages, and between the instruments themselves as they carried various motifs, all of which allowed Canellakis and Per Rostad to strut their stuff. But “strut” conveys exactly the wrong feeling, because even as they shone brightly as momentary soloists, these two players stood out even more as modest, hardworking collaborators, joining together on just this one occasion to render the Brahms piece in all its overwhelming power.
I, of course, had nothing to do with their coming together in this way; and yet, because I had been following each of them for so long and was now getting to see them for the first time together, I felt somewhat like a proud dinner-party host who has finally managed to introduce two of her good friends to each other. It was as if the deeply personal and the transcendently impersonal had melded together to shape the perfect concert experience—so much so that even a warmly appreciative Brahms, smiling in his characteristically melancholy way, seemed to be sitting there at the dinner table with us.