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The Pacifica Quartet at Oberlin: 15 minutes with Sibbi Bernhardsson
by Daniel Hathaway
The Oberlin Conservatory has served as incubator for a number of chamber music ensembles now touring on an international basis. The Pacifica Quartet (Sibbi Bernhardsson & Simin Ganatra, violins, Masumi Per Rostad, viola & Brandon Vamos, cello) will return to the school — where two of its members were trained and three of the four players originally met — for a concert on the Oberlin Artist Recital Series on Wednesday, February 16 at 8:00 pm in Finney Chapel. We reached Sibbi Bernhardsson (right, above) by cell phone as he and the quartet were enroute to the Atlanta airport after an appearance in Alabama.DH: I wanted to ask you about the formation of the quartet. Did you actually first come together at Oberlin?
SB: We didn't actually start at Oberlin, but we have very, very significant Oberlin ties because Simin and myself both went to school there — we graduated in 1995 — and our teachers, Almita & Roland Vamos, used to be on the faculty at Oberlin for many, many years. They are also the parents of our cellist, Brandon Vamos. He was at Eastman, then at Yale, but he would come and visit his parents for Thanksgiving and the holidays, so we got to know him really well through his parents. We would play with him when he came home and we would do the same summer music festivals. The Quartet started right after we all graduated in the fall of 1995. While it didn't actually start at Oberlin, you could say the groundwork was laid at Oberlin. At that time, there was a lot of chamber music and a lot of great groups were there right then. The Miro Quartet was founded at Oberlin, and the new music ensemble eighth blackbird was founded at Oberlin at exactly the same time. So chamber music has always held an important role at Oberlin and still does. We're really excited to come back.
DH: Is this the first time the Quartet has returned to play at Oberlin?
SB: This is actually the third time. We once did a mini residency where we were working with composers and coaching some groups, and played a new music concert, and then about four years ago we played on the same series that we're going to be playing this time. For me and Simin, of course, it's incredibly fun and exciting to come back since we have such good memories of going to school there. I personally am really looking forward to this concert.
DH: You've certainly been doing some interesting things. The quartet seems to be very much engaged in performing complete cycles of composers' works.
SB: Yes, we've done the Beethoven cycle on several occasions over a period of time. We did the cycle in Napa, Califiornia at the Vineyard Festival. We did it in Chicago and it was pretty neat because there were five presenters that co-presented the cycle in different venues all over Chicago. It became this great Beethoven celebration that also included educational components. Then we also did the Beethoven cycle in a series of noontime concerts at Columbia University. Our next Beethoven cycle will be at Suntory Hall in Tokyo, where we’ll play the complete quartets in five concerts over three days. Then we will also do a Beethoven cycle at the Met museum next season.
DH: What is it like to play all the Beethoven quartets in a short period of time?
SB: We really like it. We like doing cycles in general because you really immerse yourself in the mind of a composer. With the Beethoven cycle, it really feels like you're dealing with three composers because the early, middle and late periods are so vastly different from each other — all fantastic music, but it's interesting when you go through the development and the whole psychology of it all. We've done a Mendelssohn cycle, an Elliott Carter cycle, and we're now in the midst of doing the entire Shostakovitch cycle in several venues. It’s exciting to delve into the minds of such geniuses and we also just learn so much from it. You get into the language and start living and breathing this music, and then after a while— having lived in this world — you start feeling like you make educated decisions about what an accent or dynamic marking means in Mendelssohn vs. Beethoven vs. Elliott Carter. From the standpoint of the audience, it's good get into the sound world of a composer: you see it as a whole thing rather than isolated works. In the course of a year, we play 90 or so concerts, most of them just regular concerts with three different pieces, but the cycles have proved to be a very important part of what we do. It excites us, and I think it has really helped us a lot as a quartet. We have learned a lot from it.
DH: I notice that you're going to be performing at the Oregon Bach Festival with Jörg Widmann.
SB: You know Jörg Widmann, of course, because of his residency with The Cleveland Orchestra. He's a great composer. We were really lucky about four years ago -- we were playing a series at a festival in Badenweiler, Germany. We were doing 3 sets of concerts. On one of them we played the Brahms clarinet quintet with Jörg Widmann. He has also been sort of a resident there — he'd often come and spend a week at Badenweiler, which is a very beautiful place, and just write music. When we met him, he was really establishing himself as one of the most important German composers. He had just received the Claudio Abbado award, and he was finishing off a commission for the Vienna Philharmonic, but he was practically unknown in the U.S. There had been only one piece of his performed, which was by a community orchestra in Colorado that a friend of his conducted. We played with him, and we feel he's one of the great, great clarinet players out there. And we listened to his music and we loved it. It's very creative music. He's such a skilled musician, but also very imaginative. We said that we would love to do a project with him in the States — so we're playing at the Oregon Bach Festival, and at San Francisco Performances. We'll play the Brahms Clarinet Quintet with him, then one of his string quartets, then he'll play one or two solo clarinet pieces. So it's going to be a real collaboration. He's a good friend of ours.
DH: Let me ask you a bit about yourself. You're Icelandic, and Iceland has been in the headlines a lot recently. What are things like there at the moment?
SB: The volcano has stopped, but there's still ash in that area. I mean, Icelanders say they once in a while like to remind the world that they actually exist — it's just a small country. Actually, it was quite something but things are getting better economically. What is exciting to me in living abroad and looking at the situation from afar, is that now people are saying it was very much like here. There was the mortgage crisis, then people were just overinvesting — and those incredible, amazing banking situations! It's now much more about startup companies, about people doing things simply. From what my family says and what you learn from reading the papers: people just took a step back and just realized that (laughs) there's more to life than money. It's still depressing to see all the negative publicity the country has had because of that, and what is also sad is that our currency has suffered so greatly that a great worry is that it's going to be harder for people to go abroad and study. The real risk is the loss of human resources if we cannot maintain an educated population — because what we have right now is a very educated population and we're sort of proud of that. But we also feel that things have been exaggerated greatly because nobody's starving, and when people talk about economic crisis, and how terrible the situation is, there are places in the world where things actually are terrible. In comparison to that, we are doing just fine and it's almost a luxurious problem to consider this to be an economic crisis. In comparison to how people were living three years ago, sure, it's a stark difference. But things are fine and this has changed people's value systems.
DH: What took you from Iceland to Oberlin in the first place?
SB: My teachers — Brandon's parents — had come to Iceland and gave master classes -- that's how I met them. They go to Iceland to teach or vacation almost every year. They've had many Icelandic students and they've become great friends of the country.
DH: You've had some interesting television experiences, I believe. MTV, Saturday Night Live and Jay Leno. How did that come about?
SB: All of that happened because of Bjork. Bjork is Icelandic and she and I went to same music school, though she's a little bit older than I am. She was doing an album using electronics and a hardcore beat, mixed with strings. I did that album with her then I ended up travelling all over the world on and off for about a year and a half. It was a fun, great experience. She's a great musician — in a different kind of music than I do today. She's really serious and dedicated and really earnest about her music making.
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