The DaPonte String Quartet greets the spring with “Voices of Angels,” a program filled with unusual offerings, running March 20-23 in Thomaston, Damariscotta, Portland and Topsham.

In addition to Randall Thompson’s “Alleluia,” an irresistible and perennially youthful four-part choral work arranged for string quartet, and Franz Joseph Haydn’s well loved “Dream Quartet,” there are two pieces that stand out in the program for differing reasons.

Earl Stewart’s “Blues Fugues” has particular resonance for DaPonte violist Kirsten Monke. Monke played regularly for Stewart when he was a professor of black studies at the University of California Santa Barbara and she was a graduate fellow.

Then one day she ran into him in a music store. “I was surprised to see him terribly crippled,” Monke said. Stewart told her he had been suffering from Guillain-Barre syndrome and spent 16 months in the hospital.

“For five of those months, he was entirely paralyzed, save for his eyelids,” Monke said. “It was in this state that he conceived his ‘Blues Fugues.’ Inspired by his love of Bach’s ‘Fugues and Inventions,’ Stewart worked out the tunes and their counterpoint in his head, to pass the time, but more importantly, he said, to keep himself from losing his mind.”

The final piece in the program, George Crumb’s “Black Angels for Electric String Quartet: Thirteen Images from the Dark Land,” is a “voyage of the soul” inspired by the Vietnam War. A challenge for any quartet, the piece requires the musicians to play not only electric stringed instruments but percussion instruments ranging from gongs, mallets, maracas, 14 tuned crystal goblets, glass rods, and thimbles, even a metal plectra. They also vocalize in six languages, rap knuckles and bows on the instruments, produce tongue clicks and whistle.

DaPonte violinist Ferdinand Liva describes it as “a piece that ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous.” “You should see us working with paper clips, thimbles, and glass rods,” he said.

Liva said that the initial temptation to view this score as mere theatrical gimmick is quickly allayed by both its deep content and the secure place it has earned in the standard string quartet repertory since Crumb finished it 44 years ago, almost to the day, on Friday, March 13, 1970.

Performances are at 7:30 p.m. at these three locations: March 20, Thomaston at St. John’s Church, 200 Main Street; March 21, Damariscotta at Lincoln Theater, 2 Theater Street, and on March 22 in Portland at the Public Library, 5 Monument Square.

And on March 23 in Topsham at 3 p.m. at the Mid-Coast Presbyterian Church located at 84 Main Street.

Tickets are $20, and are available at www.daponte.org or by calling 207-529-4555.

The DaPonte String Quartet moved to Maine in 1992 on a rural arts grant from Chamber Music America and the National Endowment for the Arts. They perform over 40 concerts a year from Presque Isle to Ogunquit.