The violinist Abel Tomàs, the youngest member of the Quartet Casals, welcomes this newspaper to his home in Barcelona, in whose basement, next to the bedroom, the ensemble has a rehearsal room. He was a 16-year-old teenager when, together with his brother and two other musicians from the Reina Sofía School in Madrid, they founded what would be one of the most successful chamber ensembles of the new century, on a planetary scale.
And when 25 years have passed since the group's debut in Toledo, the members take stock and see that they have never been doing anything else for so long. Their lives have changed since their adolescent beginnings, now they live as a couple or children have been born and, although there have been crises, none have even considered leaving. They are expert negotiators, capable of taking on the ideas of others and live in a constant pact. The quartet is their anchor.
“My life consists of two marriages, mine and the quartet. And when we're on vacation it's weird, yes. Going back to the routine and rehearsing again focuses me a bit, but out of habit”, assures the violinist born in Barcelona in 1980.
His performances are regularly expected in the most prestigious concert halls in the world, from Carnegie Hall in New York to the Philarmonie Berlin, the Cité de la Musique in Paris, the Konzerthaus and Musikverein in Vienna or the Suntory Hall in Tokyo. But they have played in remote parts of the Amazon before an audience that had never heard Beethoven before. Currently its activity is between sixty and seventy concerts a year. And apart from giving quartet classes at the Esmuc in Barcelona, they are guest professors in The Hague, in Fiesole or the master classes that they are asked to do in the United States.
Is it a very slave job?
“And also very satisfying, otherwise you wouldn't have to hold out that long. And I agree that it anchors and gives stability at many levels”, answers Vera Martínez Mehner (Madrid, 1978). "Even after 25 years we continue to learn and dig deeper and deeper, it's never repetitive," she adds.
The string quartet is one of the oldest formations (the Borodin of the USSR lasted 70 years), so the Casals feel that they have completed a half marathon. In any case, they do not contemplate their whole if they do not form it.
“Longevity is important, but above all the concept of the four of us,” points out Jonathan Brown (Chicago, 1974), the violist who joined the group in 2002. “If we talk, for example, of the Gewandhaus Quartett in Leipzig, which premiered the Schumann Quartets –he adds–, we see that they last for many decades because they are like institutions, the members change. And we are not interested in making changes or in Casals surviving with four different musicians”.
La Vanguardia finds them rehearsing Schubert, whose String Quintet will play today, Thursday (7:00 p.m.) at L’Auditori, together with cellist Santiago Cañón. It is a preview of the Barcelona Quartet Biennale that they would curate with L’Auditori and that in September –from the 14th to the 18th– will bring to the city the Jerusalem, Ébène, Belcea...
However, they are celebrating their silver jubilee with a special recording -their fourteenth recording project- that they have made in the church of Cardona: The Art of Bach's Fugue, which they are about to release with Harmonia Mundi.
“Just as we did with the complete Schubert Quartets for the 15th anniversary and with Beethoven for the 20th, this time we are trying to make a project off the menu, something different that also nourishes us as musicians”, says cellist Arnau Tomàs (Barcelona, 1973). “It has been interesting to delve into the language of Bach, a precursor to the quartet. He didn't write them as such, of course, but he did write counterpoint in four voices. Bach has a recorded output, people like to listen to it at home”.
Due to their concept of sound and their ability to treat the strings, the Casals, who for the baroque repertoire change the bow but not the metal strings for the gut strings on the instrument, have reached a point where they confuse even the experts . “Our Bach technician is the one who always records with Amandine Beyer's Gli Incogniti, and he told us that when he listened to us it seemed like we were playing with gut strings”, smiles mischievously, Abel Tomàs.
The way of functioning in the quartet is something that marks these musicians in such a way that, as Jonathan explains, "sometimes I find myself in situations outside the formation in which the most normal and comfortable thing for me is to act as if I were in the quartet. For example... if I'm with my aunt and my brother, we meet, we talk about everything and we vote. For me it's the most normal thing. We are very used to agreeing, agreeing, trying to understand the perspective of others".
"Yes, when we were young -says Abel- we fought much more, we were more radical, we thought that things had to be of a certain color. And when we teach sometimes we find students who come and tell you... ' but it is that your quartet partner has told us to do it that way'. 'But do you think we are a clone?', I answer them. The strange thing is that two people say the same thing. It's a version of all four."
The secret of the quartet's success has a lot to do with how they reach that kind of understanding. It is not just about adding ideas, concepts or information, but about making the ideas of others your own.
"It is necessary, because if you are not one hundred percent convinced, it is played in another way and it is not so convincing," Vera maintains. "Therefore, you have to go through a personal process to incorporate all the ideas in order to create a version with enough packaging. And that's where the sensations and the energies and the emotional states in which we find ourselves at that moment come in."
One characteristic that they do not usually comment on is that at concerts each of them tries to play as well as possible, and that gives them freedom, security and calm. Although there are discussions, they know that at the time of the concert everyone goes to one. Respect is perhaps the most important word within the quartet. And in fact they educate their quartet students on this premise. So that they learn to live together in a quartet, both in rehearsal and outside.
"Many quartets that we see that hit it is for this reason, because they are fed up with each other or because one of them has no sense of commitment, something very typical. In the end the group ends up being destroyed. It is not easy for them to endure, but It's because of that aspect," says Arnau.
"We advise them on rehearsal techniques, ways to manage confrontation, turn of speech... And one of the typical mistakes is that at first they even coexist too much. Because when they are young they believe that apart from playing together they have to be good friends and they go to a massive one and stay there isolated for two weeks to prepare something. That has its risks. The more you share, the more risks there are of conflict outside the rehearsal. "
That is something that the Casals take great care of: being distant. And it surprises them that, for example, the Modigliani Quartet always go to lunch together, to dinner... "We don't do that, in any case the brothers, because we are family and we talk about other things. But I remember that I told him to members of another quartet hoping that they would find it very grotesque. 'You know what the Modigliani do? They always eat together' And the answer was... 'Well, we do it too', ha ha ha."
4
