Wee-Yang debuts with string quartet

The Spokane String Quartet begins its 26th season on Sunday with a new member.

Violist Jeanette Wee-Yang joins violinists Kelly Farris and Tana Bachman and cellist Helen Byrne at The Met in a program of quartets by W. A. Mozart, Robert Schumann and Bela Bartok.

Wee-Yang replaces Nicholas Carper, who resigned from the quartet late last season to devote more time to teaching and to his duties as the Spokane Symphony’s principal violist.

She was born in Singapore but moved to Vancouver, B.C., when she was 6.

“My parents moved to Canada because of my father’s work as a cancer researcher,” she says. “My mother taught music in schools and started me and my two sisters on piano. We all started on violin, as well. But we wanted our own identities, so we gravitated to different instruments.

“My older sister, who kept playing violin, is now a doctor, and my younger sister, a cellist, is now a pharmacist. So the science genes won out there, I guess.”

Like many violists, Wee-Yang moved from violin to viola because violists are scarce.

“When I was 13, a group I was working with needed a violist, and my teacher, Gerald Stanick, asked me to play the viola,” she says. “I like the sound, and I found I enjoyed playing viola more.”

After completing her undergraduate training at the University of British Columbia, Wee-Yang came to the U.S. for graduate study with Atar Arad at Indiana University. Following her graduation there, she married Dr. Daniel Yang. The couple have three children, aged 8, 6 and 4.

Although she taught at Carroll College in Wisconsin prior to moving to Spokane, Wee-Yang does not have a university teaching position here nor a private music studio.

“I decided not to teach here because my work with the quartet and performances as assistant principal violist of the symphony wouldn’t leave me any time to spend with my kids,” she says. “When they get home from school, I want to be here.”

Wee-Yang began playing with the Spokane Symphony in January and became the orchestra’s assistant principal violist. She was asked to join the string quartet for performances later in the season following Carper’s departure.

Although chamber music ensembles often have “relationship problems” with new members, Wee-Yang seemed to enter the group with comparative ease.

“I played chamber music with my older sister and did a lot of chamber music with other groups when I was growing up,” she says. “Each year there were competitions sponsored by the Friends of Chamber Music in Vancouver, and each year we’d form a new quartet, and often our quartet would win either the first or second prize. So that was a very good experience for me in being able to adapt.”

As with many chamber groups, each Spokane String Quartet member gets to propose favorite works for the season.

“The Bartok Third was the quartet on this concert that I suggested,” Wee-Yang says. “I had played it when I was an undergrad at UBC. It’s supposed to be the most difficult of Bartok’s four quartets. But it is so rhythmically exciting and so varied with those interesting cross-rhythms.

“Sometimes it sounds like each player is doing something completely different, but if we stick to our guns, we all come out together at the end. It may not be the usual classical music a quartet audience hears on every concert, but I think people will really enjoy it.”

The program also includes Mozart’s “Hoffmeister” Quartet (K. 499) – named after its first Viennese publisher, Franz Anton Hoffmeister – and Robert Schumann’s Quartet No. 3, a product of the composer’s “quartet outburst” of 1842, the year he wrote all three of his string quartets.