Good news and a good start

It wasn’t quite Oprah giving everyone in the audience a car Wednesday evening, but the big crowd at the first of four Summer Evenings of Music got happy before the before the Fine Arts Quartet and friends played a note. Wade Hobgood, dean of UWM’s Peck School of the Arts, announced that (1) donors had come through with enough dough to assure free admission to FAQ concerts through 2011-12 and (2) the miserable seats in the UWM Zelazo Center would be replaced by fall.

A third good news item came in the presence of guest violinist Ilana Setapen. Setapen, the talented young assistant concertmaster of the MSO, fell on an icy sidewalk and injured her left hand early this year. As far as I know, this was her first performance post-injury.

Setapen was as fabulous as ever in the featured role in Chausson’s Concerto for Violin, Piano and Quarter, Opus 21. Chausson’s big, ardent themes play to Setapen’s strengths. She never seems to hold anything back, yet always has plenty in reserve. That came in handy in the finale, which is all about hitting one peak after another and topping yourself again and again. Setapen did that and made thrilling music.

Xiayin Wang played the piano part, which is nearly as virtuosic and complex as the lead violin part, with the same fiery spirit as Setapen. Chausson assigned the quartet a prodding role; violinists Ralph Evans and Efim Boico, violist Nicoló Eugelmi and guest cellist Ronald Thomas surged the phrases as if to urge on and rock the violin soloist and pianist. They were the roiling sea beneath two clipper ships under full sail.

On its own, the quartet charmed with Hugo Wolf’s Italian Serenade and dug deep into Schubert’s Quartet in D minor (“Death and the Maiden”).

The players raised speed and volume slyly and slowly in the first section of the Serenade. It felt like progress against resistance; they didn’t merely move on to the dashing second section, they burst through to it.  This sense of liberation carried through to the end of this brief piece, in one rough rondo movement.

The first movement of Schubert’s quartet sounds nothing like The Erl King, his famous song. But the Fine Arts’ reading gave it a similar sense of tense, desperate flight. They dug in the bows and conjured fierce momentum.

Evans, who had a very good night all around, played especially well in the variations on Death and the Maiden, the song on which Schubert based the second movement. The composer assigned Evans all sorts of coloratura embroidery, some of it dropped devilishly between the beats or against the meter. Evans sailed through it all with great aplomb. I liked the sense of stifled but powerful emotion Thomas brought to the big cello solo in the second movement, which fit in with a larger strategy of letting it all hang out in the first movement and understating the second.

Evans, Boico, Eugelmi and Thomas had thought this thing through. They played the initial scherzo with a resolute, even stride, one beat to the bar. The tread became a lilt in the more pliant trio. The scherzo returned, but slashing and vehement the second time around, as if to rebuff the gentility that had broken out. The finale had a gypsy-dance glow about it, and it got wilder and wilder until it flamed out in a crazed — but not strained — prestissimo.

The remaining Summer Evenings of Music are Sunday, June 5; Wednesday, June 22; and Wednesday June 29, all at 7:30 p.m. in the Zelazo Center. Admission is free, but reservations are recommended; call the PSOA box office, 414 229-4308.