SSQ concert features husband/wife duo
The Spokane String Quartet ends its season Sunday with its traditional Mother’s Day concert, this time featuring a husband-and-wife duo.
The guest soloist, soprano Dawn Marie Wolski, is the wife of the quartet’s first violinist, Mateusz Wolski, the Spokane Symphony’s concertmaster.
She will sing two songs by Schubert. The quartet, which also includes violinist Misha Rosenker, violist Jeannette Wee-Yang and cellist Helen Byrne, also will perform pieces by Schubert and Verdi.
Dawn Wolski is a graduate of the Manhattan School of Music, where she met her future husband. She spent six years on active duty touring with the U.S. Army Field Band.
The singing Wolski is familiar to Spokane audiences from performances with the Spokane Symphony. She also has appeared with such ensembles as the National Symphony in Washington, D.C., the Boston and Cincinnati Pops, and the London Symphony.
She recently returned from a a series of performances in Poland and Russia, where she was among eight finalists in the Zara Dolukhanvo Art Song Competition in Kaliningrad.
“I was one of the few non-Russians, and certainly the only non-Russian speaker, in the competition,” Wolski says. “Even though I didn’t get one of the top awards, it was a great experience getting to hear singers whose approach to vocal production is a lot different that what we’re used to.”
On Sunday, she will sing Schubert’s “Salve Regina” for soprano and strings (D. 676) and one of the composer’s most famous art songs, “Der Tod und das Mädchen (Death and the Maiden).”
That will be followed by the quartet’s performance of Schubert’s String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, also called “Death and the Maiden.” Its slow movement consists of variations based on the song.
“Maybe we could have selected a quartet more appropriate to Mother’s Day than ‘Death and the Maiden,’ ” Mateusz Wolski says. “But it is such a beautiful work and we in the quartet wanted to program it. Besides, there is no arguing against playing truly great music.”
Opening Sunday’s performance will be Giuseppe Verdi’s only chamber music work, his String Quartet in E minor.
“It is a beautifully written piece, very difficult for all the players,” violinist Wolski says. “You can’t help hearing little echoes of his operas; there is a little part from ‘Aida’ in it, for instance. But it is very serious and virtuosic in approach, not just ‘nice and pretty,’ but with real meat in it.”
Verdi wrote the quartet for a private performance for close friends when he was in Naples in 1873 for revivals of his operas “Don Carlos” and “Aida.”
His biographer, Julian Budden, speculates that Verdi may have wanted to keep the quartet a private matter, like Wagner’s “Siegfried Idyll.” It was only after three years that his friends persuaded him to publish it.
“It’s a fascinating and unique work of art,” Wolski says, “and this is the Spokane quartet’s first time playing it. So we’re very excited to take a crack at it.”