WSU viola, violin teacher appearing with SSQ
The Spokane String Quartet, in its 28th season, has featured guest performers in its first violinist’s chair. Meredith Arksey will fill that role for Sunday’s performance at the Bing Crosby Theater.
Arksey, who teaches violin and viola at Washington State University, enjoys a special relationship with the quartet. As a student at Eastern Washington University, Arksey studied with Kelly Farris, the founding fist violinist of the group, who is on a leave of absence this season.
She will join violinist Tana Bland, violist Jeanette Wee-Yang and cellist Helen Byrne in a program that includes the American premiere of the String Quartet No. 4 by British composer John Pickard.
“We got to know about John Pickard’s work through JoAnne Bouma, a member of the board of the Spokane Chamber Music Association,” says Byrne.
“JoAnne had written her doctoral dissertation on the music of Edward Elgar, and Pickard is the editor of the ‘Complete Works Edition’ of Elgar.”
The 43-year-old Pickard, who teaches at the University of Bristol, studied composition with William Mathias at the University of Wales and with Louis Andriessen at the Royal Conservatory in Holland.
He wrote his Quartet No. 4 for the Sorrel Quartet, which premiered the work in England in 1998, then recorded it for the Dutton label along with Pickard’s second and third quartets.
“Pickard will be with us at Sunday’s concert and provide some spoken program notes,” Byrne says. “And he made a string quartet arrangement of Elgar’s ‘Sospiri’ – which was originally for strings, harp and organ – especially for us to play on Sunday’s program.”
The concert also will include one of the most unusual works for string quartet, the “String Quartet on B-La-F,” written by no fewer than four Russian composers: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Anatole Liadov, Alexander Borodin and Alexander Glazunov.
“It was a committee-composed musical birthday card for the 50th birthday of the Russian music publisher and arts patron M. P. Belaieff,” Byrne explains.
“These four composers got together, took the musical motto B-flat, A, F from Belaieff’s name, and used it as a theme in all of the quartet’s four movements. None of us had ever heard of this quartet before, but Meredith ran across it in the WSU library while she was looking for something else.”
Arksey, who joined the WSU faculty in 1995, is concertmaster of the Washington-Idaho Symphony.
After studying with Farris at EWU, she left Spokane for graduate study at the University of Michigan and at Michigan State University, where she received a doctorate in violin performance.