Music Reviews : Jean-Philippe Collard With Muir Quartet

It was onward and upward for the Muir String Quartet Sunday afternoon, as its Coleman Series program at Beckman Auditorium moved from an erratic warm-up through stolid respectability to substantial glory.

Credit Cesar Franck and pianist Jean-Philippe Collard for the change from prosaic craft to exhilarating art. Both of the quartet’s recordings have been award-winning collaborations with Collard in French repertory, and the combination proved coolly stunning Sunday.

The extended, often fevered ruminations of Franck’s Quintet benefited in wonderful ways from the generous application of control and intellect. Where others have found only diffuse passions and moody rumblings, Collard and the Muir Quartet illuminated structure and thematic developments with canny artifice, as well as meeting all the demands for emotional vehemence, in a balanced, articulate and utterly convincing performance.

Three-quarters of the American ensemble--violinist Bayla Keyes, violist Steven Ansell, and cellist Michael Reynolds--has been consistent since the quartet emerged from the Curtis Institute, but in recent seasons the first desk position has been unstable. Sunday the current occupant, Peter Zazofsky, contested the majority opinion about pitch and phrasing at many points in Schubert’s “Quartettsatz” in C-minor.

Zazofsky, who redeemed himself in the Franck, is only the first among equals, however. Keyes took the first chair for a technically suave reading of Britten’s Second Quartet.