Fine Arts Quartet marks final season at UWM after 55 years
Efim Boico’s violin took him from Moscow to Tel Aviv to Paris and a life of classical music on big stages with larger-than-life conductors.
So, when he received a call in 1982 to first play with the renowned Fine Arts Quartet at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, he was very excited.
There was only one problem: He couldn’t find Milwaukee on a map.
“For some reason, I thought it was around New York,” he said.
As the Fine Arts Quartet wraps up its 55th and final season at UWM with concerts Saturday and Sunday, Boico can’t help feeling nostalgic about the string quartet and its long association with the school.
The Fine Arts Quartet isn’t going away. It will play on.
But an era is clearly coming to a close. “We are retiring from the university job,” Boico said. “But we are not retiring as a quartet.”
It’s almost hard to believe in this day and age that a university would even have a quartet in residence.
But that’s how the Fine Arts Quartet operated at UWM for 55 years.
Since its founding in Chicago in 1946, there have been 19 members of the quartet. You don’t just show up to play with the quartet — you get asked to audition for a prized position.
Of the current lineup, first violinist Ralph Evans is the longest-serving player, joining in 1982. Boico, the second violinist, officially joined in 1983. They are the mainstays of the quartet’s second generation of players.
Cellist Robert Cohen arrived in 2012 and violist Juan-Miguel Hernandez came on board in 2014.
“Every musician as a string player probably has a dream to play in a quartet,” Boico said. “This is the musical group that probably has the most beautiful composers in classical music. You start from Hayden and Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, I mean we are talking the best composers in the world.”
A quartet is a thing of musical beauty, a perfect mesh of personalities, skills and playing styles.
“You spend a tremendous amount of life with your colleagues,” Evans said. “There are constant rehearsals, decisions, you’re touring with them and playing constantly. When you choose someone to join the group, you’re going to spend your life with them.”
The quartet traces its roots to 1939 when a group of players from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra began working together. They gave their first performance in 1940, but World War II put on hold any long-term plans.
When they got out of the service, violinist Leonard Sorkin and cellist George Sopkin formally founded the quartet in 1946.
The quartet quickly gained a following, appearing for eight years on Sunday morning broadcasts of ABC network radio, and later showing up on TV, including five appearances on the “Today Show” and one on the “Ed Sullivan Show.” The players also maintained a robust touring schedule.
Time Magazine caught up with the quartet on a 1959-’60 tour in an article titled “The Bang-Bang Quartet,” portraying the players as slightly raffish Chicago musicians taking on the old world of music in France, Germany and the Netherlands.
“We went into the lion’s den and came out unscathed,” violinist Abram Loft said, adding he hoped Europeans now realized that “Americans can play chamber music, even if they are from Chicago.”
Milwaukee beckoned. The quartet played several seasons of summer concerts here and finally, in 1963, became quartet-in-residence at UW-Milwaukee.
The move wasn’t without controversy. Robert Zigman, who helped found the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, questioned whether the university was competing with the symphony “under the guise of education.”
UW-Milwaukee provost J. Martin Klotsche fired back that Zigman’s remarks were “a direct attack on the integrity of the university.”
The group’s first noonday concert for students was a smash, all 304 seats taken, the aisles filled and around 100 people turned away. The quartet’s first selection: Haydn’s Quartet in D Minor, Op. 76, No. 2.
For many years, the quartet and university had a perfect marriage. The players assumed professorships, taught students, presented master classes and played beautiful music.
The university received the benefit of being allied with a world-famous quartet that through its long history put out more than 200 recordings.
It was a good, long run.
Amid budget cuts, UWM officials have had to make tough choices. In such a climate, a string quartet that cost around $500,000 annually to run became unsustainable.
The decision was made to end the residency.
“A couple of years ago, the members of the Fine Arts Quartet and the leadership of UWM came to the agreement that the quartet would end its 55-year residency in early 2018,” said Scott Emmons, dean of UWM’s Peck School of the Arts. “It has become increasingly important in the Peck School of the Arts to redirect limited resources to personnel and programs that directly enhance the teaching and mentorship of PSOA students.”
Emmons said he was thankful for the group’s long residency at the school, adding the artists “greatly enhanced the musical experience of many in our community through their high level of chamber music performance.”
The players have accepted the decision and have expressed gratitude for the long support they received from the university.
“I guess when times are bad, having a renowned string quartet isn’t really the most important thing for the university,” Evans said. “We’re disappointed, but we understand it.”
All tickets are claimed for the final UWM concerts, which will showcase the quartet’s present and future, including an Evans piece, String Quartet No. 1.
Hernandez and Cohen will soon leave the quartet. Their replacements, violist Gil Sharon and cellist Niklas Schmidt, will perform at the concerts as part of a string sextet.
Evans and Boico will remain with the quartet.
“I think we’re still at the top of our abilities,” Evans said.
The players are already plotting their future.
“For a while, I thought we’d stop playing,” Evans said. “But we decided to carry on, a resurrection. A new chapter but, unfortunately, we won’t have the university be part of that. We’re going to do our best to continue.”
The quartet has scheduled concerts in 2019 and 2020. It also wants to keep its base in Milwaukee and is looking to raise funds to stage events here.
“We do have concerts all over the world already,” Boico said. “But I feel Milwaukee is the home of the Fine Arts Quartet.”