{"id":929,"date":"2018-08-27T12:46:13","date_gmt":"2018-08-27T19:46:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/?p=929"},"modified":"2018-08-28T11:10:27","modified_gmt":"2018-08-28T18:10:27","slug":"serendipity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/serendipity\/","title":{"rendered":"Serendipity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Part One<\/strong>: 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\u2014all recent Curtis Institute graduates\u2014and 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<\/em>, even though the quartet group they played in had dissolved by the time the book came out.<\/p>\n

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\u2014two 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.\u00a0Earlier this month, on August 2, I went down to Menlo Park to hear him\u00a0play in two great\u00a0pieces,\u00a0the\u00a0Brahms Piano Quintet\u00a0and\u00a0Schoenberg’s Verkl\u00e4rte Nacht, <\/em>in the last Music@Menlo program of the season.\u00a0In both cases, Nick (as I have come to think of him) was superb.<\/p>\n

Part Two<\/strong>: This part of the story begins even farther back\u2014possibly as early as 2000 or 2001\u2014when I first became aware of a quartet group called the Pacifica Quartet. The first thing\u00a0I heard them play\u00a0was\u00a0Beethoven\u2014at a Columbia noon concert series, I believe\u2014and then, in 2010, I also began listening to\u00a0their\u00a0Shostakovich. At that point I reached out to them behind the scenes, and\u00a0when they played the full Shostakovich cycle at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, during\u00a0the 2010-11 season, I was invited\u00a0to\u00a0appear with them at each concert, talking with one or more of the players about the quartets they were about to perform. Later we\u00a0met up at Shostakovich concerts\u00a0in\u00a0Illinois 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\u00a0to the violist, Masumi Per Rostad, so I was a little disheartened\u00a0to learn last year that he had left the Pacificas to take up an excellent post at the Eastman School of Music.<\/p>\n

But recently, at\u00a0that same concert where I heard Nick Canellakis play in\u00a0the Brahms and the Schoenberg, I got news of Masumi Per Rostad. I learned from Milina Barry\u00a0(whom I’d met because\u00a0she 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\u00a0in 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\u00a0performance at Music in the Vineyards<\/a> \u2014 a venue\u00a0where I’d heard him many times when he was still with the Pacificas.<\/p>\n

Part Three<\/strong>: Okay, here is where the serendipity comes in. \u00a0I noticed that Nick Canellakis was also<\/em> scheduled to play that weekend at Music in the Vineyards. Great, I thought, two for the price of one! Since\u00a0I 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\u00a0in (there were other cellists and violists involved in the\u00a0concert), but I knew I’d get a chance to hear each of them play at least once.<\/p>\n

The August 26 concert was held in the elegant upstairs cask room of the gorgeous Inglenook Winery,\u00a0a vineyard that is now owned and run by Coppola family\u2014perhaps 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\u2014and when I peeked behind the curtain, I saw that it included both Nick and Masumi. \u00a0But what they were playing was not the Schumann, but Brahms’s Third Piano Quartet, which had been on the agenda\u00a0for 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,\u00a0with neither Masumi nor Nick), but they were<\/em> both scheduled for the Brahms, along with the fine violinist Axel Strauss and the incredibly talented pianist Michael Brown.\u00a0So if things had gone the way they should have gone, I wouldn’t\u00a0have heard them play together.\u00a0\u00a0“What luck!” I said to the man arranging the seats onstage\u00a0when I learned about the switch. “Or fate,” he said. Indeed.<\/p>\n

The Brahms Op. 60 that emerged that evening\u00a0was truly one of the most wonderful chamber performances I have ever heard. The four musicians\u00a0managed to merge\u00a0their 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\u00a0a thrilling\u00a0new partner.\u00a0The quartet seemed designed, in particular, to showcase\u00a0Nick’s and Masumi’s talents, with the extraordinarily moving\u00a0cello solo in the Andante movement and the heart-stopping passages on the viola in the Finale\u2014not 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.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0each other. It was as if the deeply personal and the transcendently impersonal had melded together to shape the perfect concert experience\u2014so much so\u00a0that even a warmly appreciative Brahms, smiling in his\u00a0characteristically melancholy way,\u00a0seemed to be sitting there at the dinner table with us.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[524,526,528,527,529,523,530,230,224,522,90,525,68],"class_list":["post-929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-lesser-blog","tag-brahms-piano-quartet-no-3","tag-brahms-piano-quintent","tag-coppola","tag-inglenook","tag-johannes-brahms","tag-masumi-per-rostad","tag-milina-barry","tag-music-in-the-vineyards","tag-musicmenlo","tag-nicholas-canellakis","tag-pacifica-quartet","tag-schoenbergs-verklarte-nacht","tag-vertigo-quartet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=929"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":934,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/929\/revisions\/934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}