Quartet becomes sextet for opener
The Spokane String Quartet opens its 2005-06 season Sunday with a little help from two friends from another string quartet.
Violinist Michael Jinsoo Lim and violist Melia Watras, members of the Corigliano Quartet, will join the players in the Spokane quartet: violinists Kelly Farris and Tana Bland, violist Jeannette Wee-Yang and cellist Helen Byrne.
The husband-and-wife team of Lim and Watras will open Sunday’s program with Robert Mann’s “Invocation” for violin and viola. Watras will play Max Reger’s Suite for Solo Viola in E minor, and Lim will be the soloist in Georg Phillip Telemann’s Violin Concerto in G, accompanied by the quartet.
Lim and Watras will join members of the Spokane quartet to close the concert with Johannes Brahms’ Quintet in G major, Op. 111.
Chang-Min Lee, the Spokane Symphony’s new principal string bassist, also will provide accompaniment for the Telemann concerto.
The Spokane String Quartet is celebrating its 27th season this year. The group made its Carnegie Hall debut in 1980 and has since toured Europe and the British Isles four times while maintaining its regular Spokane season and playing elsewhere in the Northwest.
In addition to the standard quartet repertoire, the ensemble has frequently included premieres of works by Northwest composers and unusual and rarely performed music from the Moldenhauer Archives, founded by Spokane musicologist Hans Moldenhauer.
Lim and Watras are members of a younger ensemble. The Corigliano Quartet was formed when its players were students at Indiana University in 1996, taking its name from Grammy, Oscar and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Corigliano, who gave the group his blessing along with the use of his name.
Other players in the Corigliano Quartet are violinist Linda Bahn (with whom Lim alternates as first violin) and cellist Amy Sue Barston. The group was the grand prize winner of the Fischoff Chamber Music Competition and received the ASCAP/Chamber Music America Award for Adventurous Programming.
Lim was born in Indiana to Korean parents and studied violin with Josef Gingold at Indiana University. In addition to his performance with the Corigliano Quartet, Lim has been soloist with the Indianapolis Symphony and toured in Europe as soloist with the International Chamber Orchestra.
He was formerly a member of the American Ballet Theater Orchestra in New York and now performs with the Seattle Symphony and Seattle Opera Orchestra. Lim also serves as a coach for the Seattle Youth Symphony.
Born in Hawaii, Watras made her debut as a viola soloist with the Dayton Philharmonic when she was 16. Like Lim, she studied at Indiana University where her teacher was Atar Arad.
Watras is also a dancer, and when living in New York she made her dance debut at the Merce Cunningham Studio, where she both danced and played viola in the premiere of Kathryn Sullivan’s “At Home.”
She recently recorded a solo CD of 20th-century viola works on the Fleur de Son label. In 2004, she was appointed professor of viola at the University of Washington.