Fine Arts Quartet, with its new cellist

Robert Cohen served as the Fine Arts Quartet’s emergency cellist last spring, when the late Wolfgang Laufer fell ill. Cohen then played a tour with the FAQ and returned for a November concert, and that seems to have sealed the deal.

Before Sunday’s concert at the Zelazo Center at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Cohen told the big crowd about growing up as the son of the concertmaster of the London Philharmonic Orchestra and hearing and playing chamber music at home with his father and friends. He got the call from the Fine Arts one year and one day before the concert, and one day after his father died. Cohen had spent the bulk of his career as a touring soloist and no doubt will continue in that role, but he said that the time was right for him to turn his career more toward chamber music.

Cohen is a very good player and a nice fit with violinist Ralph Evans, second violinist Efim Boico and violist Nicolò Eugelmi. The foursome’s pitch was on target throughout the concert and they shared a firm point of view in Saint-Saëns’ String Quartet No. 2 (1918) and Brahms’ Piano Quintet, Opus 34 (1864).

The Fine Arts Quartet has been a hard-driving bunch for decades. I can’t recall them ever delivering the sort of dainty delicacy they applied to this genteel product of Saint-Saëns’ old age. That this delicacy applies to a fanfare-like opening theme made for a sweet surprise. The slow movement meanders from key to key. The Fine Arts wisely refused to try to make something of it; they ambled through it like a tourist through a resort town. The players and, I think, the composer were in no rush to go anywhere special or make a big point even in the even the Allegro part of the finale. The String Quartet No. 2 is not great music, and the FAQ treated it for what it is: a charming little thing.

The Brahms quintet is great music, with big drama and virtuoso demands. Joseph Kalichstein, a pianist especially renowned as a chamber musician, made five. He drove the thing, because the piano part is the core of it. But all five played with a single mind.

Long, complicated melodies abound. They took on unusual physicality in this reading, as strong, substantial, elastic lines. You could really hear that at the very start, when that dark melody that will become the principal theme seems driven by a powerful force to search for something. And you could hear it again in the last movement, in the big, generous gestures by way of introduction and in those strange episodes when the dashing dance theme gives way to a slow, fitful second theme.

This piece is complex formally and emotionally, but the players located themselves precisely in its structures and moods. They were all in, whether drifting along on a cloud of harmony or driving to a hell-for-leather climax.

They also thoroughly sorted out the subtleties of Brahms’ intricate rhythms. He had a way of disguising meters through displacement in the bar and forming rhythms of oddly placed notes that only make sense when the voices interlock. Evans, Boico, Eugelmi, Cohen and Kalichstein understood the context of their parts and made a compelling whole.

The guest pianist took a solo turn in Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Schumann, Opus 9. The 16 variations range from just a few seconds to several minutes and survey a wide spectrum of emotions and techniques — scampering lightness, singing lyricism, thundering climaxes, rollicking dances, dignified gliding. The Brahmsian rhythmic play of the quintet also applies here, but now Kalichstein had to handle the interlocking lines and maintain their independence and relationships himself. Kalichstein did it all.

For the schedule of concerts and further information, visit the Fine Arts Quartet page at the UWM Peck School of the Arts website.