Ex-Almira resident to perform

There is a long road from driving a farm truck in Almira, Wash., to a position in the viola section of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

That’s the road Minor Wetzel traveled.

Wetzel and his violinist wife Stacy join pianist Linda Siverts and members of the Spokane String Quartet for Sunday’s Mother’s Day concert.

The performance features Anton Bruckner’s Quintet in F major along with Paul Coletti’s Three Pieces for Viola and Piano Trio, and Handel’s Passacaglia in the virtuoso arrangement by Johan Halvorsen.

“I didn’t actually grow up on a farm,” Minor Wetzel said in a telephone interview earlier this week. “My father sold insurance, so we lived in the town of Almira, but I drove a truck in summers from the time I was able to look over the steering wheel. Driving a hay truck paid my way to Tanglewood when I was 16.”

Minor (Mick to his friends and colleagues) began playing violin when he was 9.

“I was from a family of seven children, and all of them studied an instrument,” he said. “One morning my mother asked me, ‘How would you like to play the violin?’ I was an agreeable kid, so I said, ‘Sure, why not.’ ”

The Wetzel family also included two notable singers: Mick’s mother, Betty Wetzel, who still lives in Almira, and his sister, Linda Caple, who went on to an operatic career.

Mick began studying with Sister Xavier Mary Courvosier, a Juilliard graduate and associate concertmaster of the Spokane Symphony.

“Sister Xavier was a great architect of building a violin technique,” he said. “But she told me before I left for college, ‘Whatever you do don’t let them stick a viola in your hand.’ You know how violinists feel about violists!”

After a year in Utah and a transfer to Indiana University, Wetzel took a two-year leave for church mission work in France, then returned to study with Camilla Wicks at the University of Washington.

“Camilla is just a fantastic teacher, and she’s quite a matchmaker, too,” he said. “She was always trying to set me up with this violinist in her class who was from Hollywood and had been to Juilliard. I guess she was a pretty good judge, because Stacy and I got married, and we have been together for 25 years.”

The couple followed Wicks when she joined the faculty at the University of Michigan. It was there that someone did stick a viola into Mick’s hands.

“From the minute I started playing the viola,” he said, “I was hooked. Everything that made playing the violin hard for me – the size of my hand, the length of my arm, the weight of my bow arm – worked to my advantage on the viola.”

While they were completing their master’s degrees at Michigan, Stacy Wetzel won an audition for the San Francisco Symphony. The couple moved to California, where Stacy occupied a regular chair in the orchestra and Mick was a substitute.

Then Mick won an audition in the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

“We talked about it, and Stacy said, bless her heart, ‘Mick, I’m married to you, not to the San Francisco Symphony,’ ” he said.

Now both Wetzels play in the Los Angeles Philharmonic. They live in Los Angeles and have three children whose ages range from 10 to 17.

Mick Wetzel still studies viola, now with Coletti, who heads the chamber music and viola department at UCLA.

“I heard a recording of Paul playing this piece called ‘Hora Romanesca,’ ” he said. “I knew I wanted to play it, so I asked Paul for the music, and he said, ‘I’m sorry, but I haven’t even written it out.’

“But he gave me this single page of the awfulest scratchings you can imagine – some notes, some chord symbols, some verbal directions, with arrows pointing this way and that.”

Wetzel persisted, and “Hora Romanesca” will be a part of Sunday’s performance along with two other of Coletti’s pieces, “Circus Music” and “From My Heart,” arranged for viola solo with piano, violin and cello.