Masumi Per Rostad, violin
Biography
Rostad started studying music, initially on the violin, at the Third Street Music School Settlement in New York City when he was three years old. He discovered the viola when he was twelve years old and four years later, attracted to the instrument’s warm and mellow sound, devoted himself to the viola.
As a member of the Pacifica Quartet, which he joined in 2001, Masumi has performed and toured extensively throughout the United States, Europe, Asia, and Australia. In 2009, the quartet received a Grammy for Best Chamber Music Performance and was named Musical America’s Ensemble of the Year. Other honors include the Cleveland Quartet Award and the Avery Fisher Career Grant. From 2009 to 2012, Pacifica was the quartet-in-residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a position that had been held only by the Guarneri String Quartet. The ensemble has served as quartet-in-residence at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Northwestern University, and the University of Chicago.
As a soloist, Rostad has appeared at prominent festivals including Spoleto USA, Music@Menlo, Marlboro, and Rockport Chamber Music; collaborated with such string quartets as the St. Lawrence, Pavel Hass, Emerson, and the Ying Quartet, which is the quartet-in-residence at the Eastman School of Music; and toured extensively and recorded as a former member of the International Sejong Soloists and the Metamorphosen Chamber Orchestra.
Rostad’s advocacy for the arts and passion to increase opportunities for audiences to hear chamber music led him to launch DoCha, a festival in Champaign, IL. Events feature multi-genre collaborative presentations from classical chamber music to contemporary dance to the spoken word. All programs are free and include performances for elementary school students and master classes, competitions, and performance opportunities for local music students.
Rostad has been a contributing writer to such publications as Strings, Gramophone, The Huffington Post, and The Guardian.
Rostad received his Bachelor and Master of Music degrees from The Juilliard School, where he received the Lillian Fuchs Award for outstanding graduating violist. There, he studied with legendary violist and pedagogue Karen Tuttle from the age of 17; just three years later, when he was 20, she selected him as her teaching assistant. Rostad performed the world premiere of Michael White’s Viola Concerto in Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall, and gave the New York premiere of Paul Schoenfield’s Viola Concerto with the Juilliard Symphony.
Rostad has served on the faculties of the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Chicago, and Northwestern University, and given numerous solo and chamber music master classes at schools, venues, and festivals including the Cleveland Institute of Music, the Colburn School, the New York Youth Symphony, Suntory Hall, Sydney Conservatory, the Royal College of Music, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and the Aspen and Bowdoin festivals.was praised recently by the New York Times for his playing's “thrilling virtuosity” and by Strad Magazine for its “panache”. He enjoys a varied and distinguished career as soloist, chamber musician, and teacher, and he has for several decades been recognized as one of this country’s foremost interpreters and proponents of new music. Mr. Macomber’s extensive discography includes the complete Brahms and Grieg Sonatas; violin concertos by Martin Boykan and Laura Schwendinger; and hundreds of critically praised recordings of contemporary solo and chamber works. His CD of Roger Sessions Solo Sonata was acclaimed by American Record Guide as “one of the best recordings of 20th Century solo violin music ever made.” A solo CD entitled “Songs of Solitude” was named by the New York Observer as one of 1996’s best instrumental solo discs ("Macomber's intensely human fiddle...seems an entire universe, sufficient unto itself.").
He has recorded for Nonesuch, Koch, Bridge, Arabesque, Naxos and Musical Heritage and Albany; he has performed, commissioned, and made first recordings of solo violin and chamber works by, among others, Carter, Davidovsky, Perle, Wuorinen, and Mackey. Mr. Macomber is a founding member of the Apollo Piano Trio and a member of the Da Capo Chamber Players, the Manhattan String Quartet, the Walden Chamber Players and the New York Chamber Soloists. He was for many years the violinist of Speculum Musicae and has also appeared with the New York New Music Ensemble, Group for Contemporary Music, and in chamber music series across the country and in Europe. He has been a regular participant at La Musica in Sarasota, at the Yellow Barn Festival and at the Monadnock Music Festival. As first violinist of the award-winning New World String Quartet for 11 years (1982-1993).
Mr. Macomber performed the standard repertoire as well as numerous contemporary works in performances in major halls throughout the United States and Europe, and, with the Quartet, was appointed Artist-in-Residence at Harvard University from 1982-1990; with that group he also recorded 14 discs and performed numerous times on Public Radio and Television in this country, and the BBC in Great Britain. Mr. Macomber is a longtime member of the chamber music faculty of the Juilliard School and the violin faculties of the Manhattan and Mannes Schools of Music, and has also taught at the Tanglewood Music Center and Taos School of Music. Other recent summer engagements have included Chamber Music Northwest and the Bard Festival. He holds his B.M., M.M., and D.M.A. degrees from the Juilliard School, where he was a scholarship student of Joseph Fuchs and winner of the Morris Loeb and Walter Naumburg Prizes.
