SSQ opens season with new violinists

The Spokane String Quartet begins its 2006-07 season Sunday with new faces playing first and second violin.

Kelly Farris, the quartet’s founding first violinist, is taking a year’s leave of absence after 28 years with the group. Second violinist Tana Bland is on maternity leave after giving birth to a baby girl.

So violinists Julie Ayer and Misha Rosenker will join quartet regulars Jeannette Wee-Yang on viola and Helen Byrne on cello on Sunday afternoon at The Met.

The program includes Mozart’s Quartet in F major (K. 158), Brahms’ Quartet in A minor and Wolf’s “Italian Serenade.”

Ayer, who will play first violin, has been a member of the Minnesota Orchestra since 1976. She was born in Spokane to longtime Spokane Symphony violinist Evelyn Ayer and her sister was violinist Jane Blegen, who played in both the symphony and the Spokane String Quartet.

Julie Ayer began her violin studies with her mother and with Spokane Symphony conductor Harold Paul Whelan. She attended the University of Washington, where she studied with Emanuel Zetlin, and Indiana University, where she was a student of the Cleveland Orchestra’s legendary former concertmaster, Josef Gingold.

Ayer is founder of the Hill House Chamber Players in St. Paul, Minn., and the author of “More Than Meets the Ear,” a study of the labor movement among symphony musicians.

Rosenker, in his second year as professor of violin at Eastern Washington University, grew up in Southern California, where he began his violin studies with his father Michael, former associate concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic.

He completed his bachelor’s degree at Indiana University where, like Ayer, he studied with Gingold, and earned his master’s degree at Yale.

Before joining the EWU faculty, Rosenker taught at Drake University, the Peabody Conservatory and the University of Georgia.

Wee-Yang, assistant principal violist in the Spokane Symphony, has been a member of the quartet since 2000. Byrne, the symphony’s assistant principal cellist, has performed with the quartet since 2004.

Sunday’s concert will open with an homage to the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth with a performance of a seldom-heard quartet written when the composer was 16.

Brahms was 40 when he published his Quartet in A minor, the work of a long gestation period and sharply self-critical revision.

Hugo Wolf is rarely thought of as an instrumental composer; his reputation rests on his more than 300 songs. The “Italian Serenade” is easily the most popular of Wolf’s instrumental music.