‘Long, High Notes’ Kirkman’S Specialty

Ask soprano Cynthia Kirkman about the particular pleasures of her Sunday concert with the Spokane String Quartet and you will get an earful.

“Singing itself is pure pleasure,” she says. Arnold Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 2, Op. 10, whose last two movements include a soprano, “is written for big, long high notes, where my voice is happy.” The language of the Portuguese texts in Heitor Villa-Lobos’s “Bachianas brasileiras” No. 5 is “so relaxed, beautiful and yet difficult,” she says.

Kirkman, who grew up attending Spokane Symphony concerts and whose first music teacher was Spokane String Quartet member Jane Ayer Blegen, is especially excited about her debut concert with the string quartet. “It is a privilege. I’ve known these people all my life,” she says. “To have been asked to perform with them is a huge compliment.”

Song is the leitmotif of the string quartet’s program for Sunday’s concert at The Met. And Franz Schubert is its patron saint. All three of the scheduled pieces center on poems of the sort Schubert inevitably chose for setting to music - poems that are studies in deeply felt emotion and subjectivity.

Spokane String Quartet violinists Blegen and Kelly Farris, violist Claire Keeble and cellist John Marshall will perform one of Schubert’s masterworks, the String Quartet in D minor. The piece is known as “Death and the Maiden” because its slow movement develops in theme and variations the funereal hymn that death sings to a young girl in Schubert’s song of the same name. Its last movement, a frenetic danse macabre, echoes another morbid melody - the cry of a young boy facing death, from Schubert’s song “Der Erlkonig.”

Kirkman says of Schubert: “He is the primer on German Lieder, and the ultimate example of wedding music and poetry.” It’s probably no coincidence, then, that Arnold Schoenberg’s first foray outside the classical Schubertian system of major-minor tonality occurred in Op. 10, in the rich terrain of string quartet and voice. Schoenberg’s revolutionary poly-tonality didn’t make him popular. The audience at the quartet’s premier “shuffled their feet and shouted.”

Yet both the Schoenberg String Quartet and Villa-Lobos’ “Bachianas brasileiras” No. 5 are wrenchingly beautiful examples of the marriage of poetry and music.

Brazilian composer Villa-Lobos originally scored his work for an “orchestra” of eight cellos plus soprano. Kirkman first sang the piece several years ago with the Spokane Symphony in an arrangement by music director Fabio Mechetti. Sunday’s concert features Mechetti’s arrangement of the first movement and Karen Walthinsen’s arrangement of the second movement.

Though Kirkman has lived in New York since 1992, where she studies voice with Julia Barrera DeCurtis and directs a singers’ workshop called “Opera Under Construction,” her favorite performing venue is still Spokane. She will appear with the symphony later this spring in a performance of Mozart’s Requiem. Of this Sunday, she says, “This is a very special concert for me.”

IN CONCERT String Quartet The Spokane String Quartet with guest artist Cynthia Kirkman When/where: Sunday at 3 p.m. at The Met. Tickets: $15 for adults, $12 for seniors and $6 for students, available at G&B Select-a-Seat outlets, by phone at (800) 325-SEAT or online at www.ticketswest.com.