Misha Rosenker joins SSQ Sunday at Crosby Theater

String quartets, like corporate managements, undergo personnel shifts.

The Spokane String Quartet spent the first 27 years of its existence with Kelly Farris, its founding first violinist. This season, though, Farris has granted himself a leave of absence, and the ensemble has had a new first violin for each performance.

Sunday afternoon, Misha Rosenker will be on first, with Tana Bland returning to the second violinist’s chair, along with violist Jeannette Wee-Yang and cellist Helen Byrne. The group will perform works by Haydn, Borodin and Shostakovich.

Rosenker is in his second year as Farris’ successor teaching violin and viola at Eastern Washington University. He performed as second violinist with the quartet earlier this season when Bland took maternity leave.

His father had been associate concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic and was Misha’s first teacher. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Indiana University, where he studied with the legendary Josef Gingold, and his master’s degree from Yale as a student of Sidney Harth.

Rosenker taught at the University of Georgia, at the Peabody Conservatory and at Drake University before moving to Spokane.

“We have been looking forward to playing this concert with Misha,” says cellist Helene Byrne. “He was our very late, last-minute replacement for Tana last October. We had a great time working with him then, and for our pops concert at CenterStage in November, and we enjoyed listening to him when he played with the Aetos Trio on our series in December.

“But this is the concert we have been planning with Misha since last year,” Byrne says, “so here we are at last.”

The group has performed several of Shostakovich’s string quartets in past seasons, but had not played the earlier quartets. Byrne says she had been listening to a recorded set of all 14 of Shostakovich’s quartets and concluded, “Well, why not start at the beginning?

“The First Quartet is quite lighthearted, and its miniature movements sparkle with Shostakovich’s humor,” she says.

Sunday’s program also includes two of the most popular works from the string quartet repertoire: Joseph Haydn’s Quartet in D major, Op. 64, No. 5 (“The Lark”) and Alexander Borodin’s Quartet No. 2, which furnishes melodies heard in two of the hit songs in the score of the 1953 musical “Kismet.”