String Fling

Since 1944, the Music Guild, a chamber music organization, has helped make Los Angeles safe for chamber music, bringing groups to Southern California from around the world.

During the 1998-99 season, the guild’s presence in the Valley was improved by moving its base of operations to the larger, more acoustically friendly Performing Arts Center at Cal State Northridge.

Monday at CSUN, the Music Guild will present the Lafayette String Quartet.

A female group, the quartet was formed in Indiana in 1984. It solidified two years later with the lineup of second violist Sharon Stanis, first violinist Ann Elliott Goldschmid, violist Joanna Hood and cellist Pamela Highbaugh Aloni, at a time when gender was more of an issue in the male-dominated classical music field.

Has its status as a female group been a liability or an asset in the quartet’s career, or both?

“I couldn’t tell you, because I’ve never been in an all-male quartet,” Stanis said, laughing. “I think we’re being trailblazers, in a way. To us, there’s no how-to. We’re writing it as we go along.”

Stanis spoke by phone this week from Portland, where the group was participating in the Chamber Music Northwest program. The quartet has a full schedule of performing, recording and teaching as the artists-in-residence at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, since 1991.

At CSUN, the quartet’s program will include Schubert’s G Major Quartet and Stravinsky’s “Three Pieces,” which the group recorded for one of its five CDs (three of which are on the Dorian label).

“There are three vignettes,” Stanis said of the piece, “and it’s cool because the string parts don’t even sound like strings, with pizzicati and all the different (effects). You’re trying not to sound like four string instruments.”

The Lafayette String Quartet has settled into the cultural fabric of life on Victoria and in the rest of Canada.

“More and more,” Stanis said, “we’re getting [well-known] guest artists on our island, because people are getting revved up about raising money. I feel really excited, too, because Victoria has taken us on as their own. We’re their quartet.”

Next year, the group will mount the ambitious Beethoven cycle of quartets, to be performed in its adopted hometown and other Canadian cities.

“It’s a milestone, a rite of passage,” Stanis said.

For now, the quartet continues its slow, steady course as a firmly established member in the growing ranks of active string quartets.

It requires the wearing of many hats.

“We have the teaching hats on, we have the performing hats on, the rehearsal hats, the administrative hats,” Stanis said. “Then there are the wife hats and the mother hats. There’s a good mix there.”

BE THERE

Lafayette String Quartet, at the Performing Arts Center, CSUN, 18111 Nordhoff St. in Northridge, Monday at 8 p.m. Tickets are $22; (888) 315-7888.