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Two of the most famous works in the string quartet repertoire can be heard live in Hilo tonight starting at 7 p.m. at the University of Hawaii at Hilo Performing Arts Center.

The renowned and Grammy-Award-winning Parker Quartet — named for the historic Parker House in Boston — will perform the string quartet by the young Maurice Ravel and the immortal “Death and the Maiden” quartet of Franz Schubert, written when he was the same age as Ravel, but near the end of his short and tragic life.

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The Parker Quartet (violinists Daniel Chong and Ken Hamao, violist Jessica Bodner, and cellist Kee Hyun Kim) has been in existence since 2002, but three of its current members played music together long before then when they were sophomores at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.

“We started playing together, because we knew each other from different summer musical festivals,” Chong said in a press release. “We thought, maybe we should play together in a quartet. Everyone was agreeable, and we took it very seriously. But it’s not something we started and said, ‘let’s make a professional career out of this.’”

That came about because as they made their way through school, their teachers encouraged them to stay together. When they graduated, they talked about whether to maintain a quartet or go their separate ways.

“Unanimously, we said, let’s give this a shot,” Chong said.

They dedicated themselves to quartet music and went on to win several prestigious competitions. Those awards led to international tours, which often occupy about half of each month.

Bodner started playing violin in 1985 when she was 2 after seeing Itzhak Perlman on “Sesame Street.”

“I must have had a magnetic pull to the idea of playing and creating sound, and that magnetic pull has never left,” she said.

When she was 11, she began to be drawn to practicing melodies on the violin’s lower strings much more than the passages on the higher register of the instrument.

“I luckily had a teacher that recognized this tendency, and suggested I try viola,” she said. “This thought had never crossed my mind, but I’m so thankful that this teacher suggested that. I practiced both violin and viola for about a year, and then I knew that the viola was the instrument for me.”

The quartet’s Hilo concert will begin with American composer John Adams’ “Fellow Traveler,” which has been described as “a short ride in a fast machine.”

Following it will be Ravel’s only string quartet, written in 1903 when the composer was 28 and was enamored of Claude Debussy’s music. The influence of Debussy’s string quartet, written 10 years earlier, is obvious.

The evening’s finale, Schubert’s D minor quartet, “Death and the Maiden,” is so subtitled because Schubert borrowed the theme for the second movement from his 1817 song about death coming gently to claim the life of a young girl. It is not a happy piece.

As the composer wrote in 1824 while he was composing the work, “My compositions are the product of my mind and spring from my sorrow.”

Tickets for tonight’s concert ($30 general admission; $25 for those 60 and older; $10 for students) are available at Basically Books and Most Irresistible Shop, as well as online at www.hawaiiconcertsociety.org.

Remaining tickets will be sold at the door.