SSQ season-opener Sunday

The Spokane String Quartet will open its 2007-08 season on Sunday, not exactly under new management, but with a new person in the first violinist’s chair.

That violinist is Mateusz Wolski. Like his predecessor, the Spokane Quartet’s founding first violinist Kelly Farris, Wolski is the concertmaster of the Spokane Symphony. When Farris retired from his Spokane Symphony position, he awarded himself a leave of absence from the quartet. Last season each of the quartet’s concerts featured a different first violinist. This season, Wolski will perform in four of its five concerts.

Wolski will join the quartet’s other players – second violinist Tana Bland, violist Jeannette Wee-Yang and cellist Helen Byrne – in a program of quartets by Beethoven, Schubert and Dvorak.

Wolski was born in Warsaw, Poland, and studied at the Polish National Conservatory. He was awarded a full scholarship at the Manhattan School of Music in New York, where he studied with New York Philharmonic concertmaster Glenn Dicterow. Wolski also has studied chamber music with members of England’s Amadeus Quartet.

Wolksi has performed as a member of the violin sections of the New York Philharmonic and the Baltimore Symphony. Before taking the concertmaster position in Spokane, he served as concertmaster of the Annapolis Symphony. He has played more than 100 concerts in the U.S. and Europe.

Sunday’s concert will open with Franz Schubert’s String Quartet No. 12. Its nickname, “the Rosamunde Quartet,” comes from a melody Schubert borrowed from music he wrote for the now-forgotten play “Rosamunde, Princess of Cyprus,” by Wilhelmine von Chezy.

The Schubert work will be followed by another quartet also best known by a nickname, Antonin Dvorak’s “American” Quartet, Op. 96. The work was one of the products of the composer’s two-year experience in America as director of New York’s National Conservatory of Music. While in America, Dvorak heard spirituals, plantation songs and Native American music, echoes of which can be heard in this quartet, as well as in other works, such as his “New World” Symphony.

Ludwig van Beethoven’s three quartets, Op. 59, also have a nickname, the “Rasumovsky” quartets, taken from the name of the Russian ambassador who commissioned them, Count Andreas Kyrillovich Rasumovsky. The Count asked Beethoven to include a Russian folksong melody in each, and for the first two of the set, Beethoven obliged. In the third of the set, with which the Spokane Quartet conclude its concert Sunday, performers and scholars have looked in vain for a Russian melody. The Russian flavor is there in the work’s slow movement, but the borrowed tune is not.