Fine Arts Quartet off and on in Summer Evening 2

Long-time cellist Wolfgang Laufer has retired, so the Fine Arts Quartet invited Eric Kim to be their second guest cellist within five days. Under such circumstances, you would expect a certain period of adjustment.

Sunday evening, Kim, violinists Ralph Evans and Efim Boico and violist Nicolò Eugelmi never found common ground or even firm footing in Haydn’s Quartet, Opus 71 No. 1. No clear interpretation emerged. In such circumstances, musicians tend to press. They did Sunday, and music that wants to be bright and light and joyous flattened under the pressure of obvious effort. Pitch was a little frayed throughout and every stroke was just a little too heavy.

Pianist Xiayin Wang joined them in six selections from Joaquin Turina’s The Muses of Andalusia, from 1942. Like many French-trained Spaniards, Turina fused French Impressionist harmony with Spanish traditional modes, rhythms and melody types. The combination charms, but sudden changes in mood and idiom struck me as far-fetched in many of these pieces.

All the components of this odd-duck suite do not involve all the players. The Fine Arts left three that involve a singer off the program. The six they played included two piano solos. Luxurious harmony is the most important aspect of the first solo, and effortless, fleet sparkle is the point of the second. Wang’s pointed accents and aggressive touch repressed the sonic pleasure in the music.

Boico, who is generally self effacing in his second violin role, rolled out some real soloist’s panache for a number for violin and piano. The ensemble came together nicely in the finale, which begins and ends in a velvet fog of harmony, breaks out into the glare of an antic tune, rises to not entirely plausibe grandeur and fades into the mists from whence it came.

By the time the string players got around to Schumann’s Quartet, Opus 41 No. 1, they were well-acquainted and sure of themselves. That’s good, because Schumann’s dense counterpoint, busy close harmony and oddly couched phrasing and rhythm turn to mush if anything goes even a little wrong.

Everything went right. The foursome did especially well with the disguised meters. The players accented notes and leaned into phrases so as to make it hard to tell three from four — which was Schumann’s point. But when you were supposed to feel the beat — as in the wild 6/8 gallop in the scherzo and the violent syncopations of the finale — the players beat it with gusto. Evans was at his very best with the ardent love song that is the principal theme of the Adagio, and guest cellist Kim made his mark by replying with even greater ardor.

This was the second of four Fine Arts Quartet Summer Evenings of Music in the Zelazo Center at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where the quartet is in residence. The remaining programs are set for June 22 and 29. Admission is free, but tickets are required. Call the UWM Peck School of the Arts box office, 414 229-4308.