The Fine Arts Quartet For Free

The Fine Arts Quartet, one of the world’s finest chamber ensembles, will perform two free concerts on January 29 and 30 at the UW-Milwaukee Zelazo Center for the Performing Arts. Ensemble members Ralph Evans, Efim Boico, Gil Sharon, and Niklas Schmidt recently completed a European tour that included performances in Italy, France, Germany and Romania.

The quartet, which celebrated its 75^th anniversary in 2021, served a 55-year teaching residency at the Sorkin International Institute of Chamber Music at UW-Milwaukee. After the affiliation with UWM ended in 2018, the Friends of the Fine Arts Quartet was formed to sustain a local connection to the ensemble. FOFAQ sponsors free quartet concerts in Milwaukee and plans a week of performances in Summer 2022.

Quartet second violinist Boico shaped the programs for these concerts, the first held in Milwaukee since 2019, in hopes that the audience would experience “incredible excitement” about the music. Because of COVID cancellations, he said, “People didn’t hear us for two years; we can’t come back and play just a regular program.” Thus the Quartet added two string quintets and one string sextet to the repertoire for this weekend’s performances and invited French cellist Frédéric Audibert and Romanian violist Răzvan Popovici to join them.

Saturday’s performance opens with the Viola Quintet in C Major, KV 515, by W. A. Mozart. Written in 1787, shortly after the debut of his opera Don Giovanni, the quintet is considered one of Mozart’s finest chamber works. Mozart’s addition of a second viola to a string quartet was a musical innovation. He eventually composed six viola quintets, a form that, according to musicologist Kai Christiansen, “enable(s) Mozart to create new textures and a wonderful interplay of duets, antiphonal quartets and everything in between.”

A relatively unknown work by French/German composer Théodore Gouvy (1819-1898) closes Saturday’s program. Added to the FAQ’s repertoire some years ago for a French music festival, Gouvy’s String Quintet, Op. 55, is written for string quartet plus a second cello. Boico said the quartet is eager to introduce this “fantastic, beautiful, romantic music” to its Milwaukee audience.

Sunday’s concert features Ludwig van Beethoven’s popular String Quartet in C minor, Op. 18, No. 4. One of a group of six quartets published in 1801, the composition is the only one in the set written in a minor key. The pace is brisk throughout, with moments of tension, drama, and complexity.

The String Quartet No. 2 “Company,” by Philip Glass, is a marked contrast in pace and mood. Written in 1983 for a theatrical adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s novella Company, the piece reflects the wanderings of an old man’s mind, as he lies on his back alone in the dark, awaiting his death.

Audibert and Popovici join the quartet for the final piece on Sunday’s program: String Sextet “Souvenir de Florence” by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893). With the addition of the second violist and cellist, the performers create a nearly symphonic sound in a musical celebration of Italy.

The Fine Arts Quartet concerts on Saturday, January 29 and Sunday, January 30 both begin at 3 pm at the UWM Zelazo Center, 2419 E. Kenwood Blvd. Michael Barndt, a founding member of FOFAQ (and an Urban Milwaukee contributor), will present pre-concert talks at 2 pm each day. No tickets are required; the audience will be offered general seating as doors to the hall open about 20 minutes before the concert starts. Audience members must be masked and are required to show a valid ID and proof of vaccination against COVID-19 or proof of a negative test within 72 hours.