Windy Conditions The Spokane String Quartet, Along With A Few Wind Players From The Spokane Symphony, Turn Chamber Music Into A Small Orchestra In Performance On Tuesday

FOR THE RECORD: 5-2-2000 Time wrong: The Spokane String Quartet will perform tonight beginning at 7:30 at The Met. The concert time was listed incorrectly in Thursday’s IN Life.

When does chamber music become music for small orchestra? The four players of a string quartet set the norm for chamber music. But there are quintets by composers from Mozart to Shostakovich, sextets by Brahms, and a septet by Beethoven.

The Spokane String Quartet will travel closer to the borderland between chamber music and orchestra music Tuesday, performing Franz Schubert’s Octet and Bohuslav Martinu’s Nonet. The members of the quartet — violinists Kelly Farris and Jane Blegen, viola Claire Keeble and cellist John Marshall — will be joined by five of the Spokane Symphony’s principal wind players and Roma Vayspapir, former principal double bass of the orchestra.

The quartet was founded in 1979 as quartet-in-residence at Eastern Washington University, and is the Inland Northwest’s only chamber ensemble presenting a regular concert series.

The group has presented premieres by local composers along with the standard quartet repertoire. The quartet has also given the first performance of 20th-century works from the manuscript archive assembled by the late Spokane musicologist and collector Hans Moldenhauer.

The quartet made its Carnegie Hall debut in 1980, and toured Europe in 1984, 1993, 1996 and 1998.

The five wind players in Tuesday’s concert — flutist Bruce Bodden, oboist Keith Thomas, clarinetist Eugene Mondie, bassoonist Lynne Feller-Marshall and horn player Margaret Wilds — have played chamber music concerts of their own. And the groups hope to establish a series of woodwind quintet programs similar to the Spokane String Quartet series.

Vayspapir, who served as principal string bass in the symphony from 1981 to 1999, has performed with the quartet many times. The bass virtuoso had previously been a member of the Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) Philharmonic and principal bass of the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra.

Schubert’s Octet was commissioned in 1824, and some Schubert scholars consider it a preparatory work for his final two symphonies. Despite the composer’s ill health at the time and his impoverished financial state, the Octet is charming and cheerful.

Martinu, a Czech-born composer, lived in Paris and the United States during World War II and later in Switzerland. He always hoped to return to Czechoslovakia. After the war, Martinu was offered a professorship at the Prague Conservatory, a position he had always coveted. But his staunch opposition to the communist regime there stood in the way of his return.

Even with his alienation from Czechoslovakia, he wrote the Nonet on Tuesday’s program in 1959 for a group of the principal players in the Czech Philharmonic.

This sidebar appeared with the story:

IN CONCERT

The Spokane String Quartet and Guests

Tuesday, 8 p.m., at The Met. Tickets are $15 (seniors $12, students with ID $6) available at the Met box office, Hoffman Music and G&B outlets (325-SEAT or 1-800-325-SEAT).