The Fine Arts Quartet, “one of the gold-plated names in chamber music” (Washington Post), ranks among the most distinguished ensembles in chamber music today, with an illustrious history of performing success and an extensive legacy of over 200 recorded works. Founded in Chicago in 1946, the Quartet is one of the elite few to have recorded and toured internationally for three quarters of a century.

The Quartet’s renowned violinists, Ralph Evans (prizewinner in the International Tchaikovsky Competition) and Efim Boico (former concertmaster of the Orchestre de Paris under Barenboim) have performed together for nearly 40 years. They are joined by two eminent musicians: violist Gil Sharon (founder of the Amati Ensemble), and cellist Niklas Schmidt (co-founder of the Trio Fontenay).

Many of the Quartet’s recent releases have been selected for inclusion on GRAMMY Awards entry lists in the categories Best Classical Album and/or Best Chamber Music Performance, and have received multiple awards and distinctions, among them: Gramophone Award Winner and Recording of Legendary Status (The Gramophone Classical Music Guide), Key Recording/Top Recommendation (Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music), Editor’s Choice (Gramophone magazine), Critic’s Choice (American Record Guide), BBC Music Magazine Choice, three times Recording of the Year (MusicWeb International), and a GRAMMY Award for producer Steven Epstein (Fauré Quintets with Cristina Ortiz). The Quartet has also received the CMA/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, given jointly by Chamber Music America and the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers. Recent releases for Naxos include Beethoven: Fugues and Rarities (8.574051) and Dvořák: Spirit of Bohemia (8.574205).

The Quartet members have nurtured many of today’s top young international quartets while teaching at the Sorkin International Institute of Chamber Music in Milwaukee and serving as guest professors at major conservatories in Paris, London, New York, Beijing, and music festivals all over the world.

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From left to right: Ralph Evans, Efim Boico, Gil Sharon and Niklas Schmidt

Among the most distinguished violinists of his time, Fritz Kreisler was born in Vienna and became a student at the Conservatory at the age of seven, studying with the younger Joseph Hellmesberger and later, in Paris, with Massart. His subsequent international career, interrupted briefly by diversion into medical studies and army service, consolidated his position as a leading virtuoso. As a composer he provided himself with a series of brief encore pieces, well suited to the then requirements of the recording studio. These took the form of arrangements and transcriptions as well as a more controversial series of pieces attributed to composers of the past but in fact by Kreisler himself. These too have become a standard part of violin repertoire and it seems strange, in retrospect, that anyone should have thought them anything but effective pastiche. His technique in performance involved a ubiquitous vibrato, applied to fast as well as slow notes.

Violin Music

Kreisler made useful additions to violin repertoire in his many transcriptions, his short compositions of acknowledged authorship, and a series of pieces that he attributed to lesser-known composers of the 18th century but were in fact his own work. Original compositions include the well-known Liebesleid (‘Sorrow of Love’) and its counterpart, Liebesfreud (‘Joy of Love’), transcribed for piano by Rachmaninov, and the pastiche Praeludium and Allegro that he attributed to Pugnani.

The great Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe was a pupil of Massart and of Wieniawski. He took part in concert tours with Anton Rubinstein and in Paris was closely associated with leading composers of the time, including Franck, Chausson and Debussy, who dedicated works to him.

Violin Music
Ysaÿe is known as a composer primarily for his six sonatas for unaccompanied violin. They form a remarkable series of works, each dedicated to a well-known contemporary virtuoso and, in a measure, alluding to their style of performance.

Efrem Zimbalist’s career was characterised by a number of enterprising concert tours. Passionate about taking music to places where it was rarely practised, when touring the Far East in the 1920s he would accept bookings in any location, however insignificant; this strategy brought him a number of pupils from Japan.

Hailed by Glazunov at his graduation recital as a ‘colossal talent’, Zimbalist was famed for his rapid pace of learning, claiming in a New York Times interview of 1911 that he could memorise any concerto in two weeks. Even when, at the end of his performing career, he came out of retirement to premiere Menotti’s Concerto in 1952 he learnt it in just three weeks.

As a stylist Zimbalist was quite reserved. His recordings of 1911–1925 for Victor reveal a focused and clean sound with the tight vibrato typical of many at this time (and quite similar to Auer’s) and a firm, articulate tone. His own Hebrew Melody and Dance (recorded in 1911) represents his compositional output here, whilst the Brahms-Joachim Hungarian Dance No. 20 (1911) demonstrates a rather more outlandish approach than in the majority of his recordings, with frequent (though rapid) portamenti and quite extreme alterations of tempo and rhythm to deliver the ‘gypsy’ folk-style with great effect. The famous 1915 pairing with Kreisler for Bach’s Double Violin Concerto shows the soloists blending well; the difference between them is most striking in the slow movement where Zimbalist, playing the second part, commences with a tone of discreet vibrato and pronounced portamenti, Kreisler sounding more modern.

Zimbalist’s 1930 recording of Brahms’s D minor Sonata reveals a pure sound with a relatively slight vibrato and sparing use of portamento. Interestingly, it also displays some of the rather odd fluctuations of tempo and rhythmic manipulations which characterise the playing of Elman and Seidel in the same sonata, albeit in different places. Tempting though it is to infer a performing tradition (perhaps associated with Auer himself ) the results are directly comparable neither to nineteenth-century performing style nor, indeed, to each other.

© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — David Milsom (A–Z of String Players, Naxos 8.558081-84)