Shanghai Quartet
In Third String Quartet, Penderecki stands on whole tradition
to reach beyond it
November 11, 2009The Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki is best known to a wide public for his avant-garde works of the 1950s and 1960s, some of which American filmmakers William Friedkin (“The Exorcist”) and Stanley Kubrick (“The Shining”) repurposed as atmospherics for high-class horror flicks.
In the md-1970s, Penderecki turned away from his dense, glimmering, highly dissonant “sonorist” style, and toward traditional forms of musical expression, to the consternation and bewilderment of his old fans.
But in his recent String Quartet No. 3, apex of a San Antonio Chamber Music Society concert Nov. 8 by the superb Shanghai Quartet, Penderecki evades both categories while retaining certain essential characteristics of each.
The piece was commissioned for the Shanghai Quartet in honor of its 25th anniversary and of the composer’s 75th birthday. It was first performed last November in Warsaw. Its subtitle is “Leaves from an Unwritten Diary,” and it has the qualities of memory and reflection. Like the best of such works, it is open-ended enough to allow the listener to pour his own thoughts into it.
The piece is in a single movement, about 16 minutes long. Much of it moves very fast, with intricate counterpoint, energetic rhythms and no shortage of dissonance. This fast material is quite diverse, culminating in a wild Gypsy dance, but there is also a unifying thread -- a pensive, meandering, lyrical theme, beautifully chorded, that appears several times in varying colorations.
One can hear echoes of the hypermodern Penderecki in some complex textures, and of the later Penderecki in the lyrical passages. One can hear, too, this music’s continuity with Expressionism, with Debussy (whose Quartet in G Minor closed the program) and Ravel, with Beethoven, even with Haydn, whose Quartet in D, Op. 20, No. 4, opened the Shanghai’s program. But the music is not in any sense a congeries of styles, or neo-anything. It is conservative in the proper sense -- not reactionary or regressive -- in that it stands on the shoulders of the entire tradition in order to reach beyond it.
The Shanghai Quartet was last in town more than 18years ago. The intervening years have brought one change in personnel: In 2000, cellist Nicholas Tzavaras joined founding violinists Weigang Li and Yi-Wen Jiang and violist Honggang Li. There’s been virtually no change in the troupe’s distinctively plush, warm, creamy sound and interpretive refinement. Maturity, however, has brought deeper engagement with the music, fuller consideration of its possibilities and a livelier sense of line. To judge from this concert, the Shanghai has become a string quartet of the first rank.
In Haydn, the troupe’s playing was classically restrained and disconcertingly flawless -- after a while one hoped in vain for a slight lapse in intonation or ensemble, lest one feel ashamed for not having had one’s nails buffed, teeth cleaned and colon irrigated prior to taking one’s seat -- but the character of the music came through. The Debussy was radiant and suffused, as it should be, with the urgency and pulse of French speech patterns.
The Shanghai’s violist, Yi-Wen Jiang, was also the composer of three pieces based on Chinese folk songs. More than mere arrangements, all three were exceptionally well-made and extensively developed in the European Romantic tradition -- so European that, despite the prominence of the pentatonic scale, they sounded remarkably like Dvorak.
Mike
Greenberg
