From The Houston Chronicle

Friday, November 19, 1999 by Charles Ward

A special pleasure of recent arts seasons has been the steady broadening of musical vision by the Houston Friends of Music. Now the group includes an intriguing piece of high quality contemporary music in almost every concert it presents.

The latest example came Thursday at Rice University with the Shanghai Quartet's debut on the chamber music series sponsored by the Friends and Rice's Shepard School of Music.

Founded at the Shanghai Conservatory and now resident at the University of Richmond, VA., the ensemble featured the String Quartet No. 3 by the Chinese-American composer Bright Sheng (born in Shanghai and now a U.S. citizen).

Sheng is somewhat known to local audiences. The Houston Symphony has commissioned two pieces and the Houston Grand Opera has staged and recorded his opera The Song of Majnun.

The String Quartet No. 3 amply illustrated the delicate goal Sheng often seeks in his music: merging the sounds and ethos of traditional Chinese music with larger-scaled, formally more rigorous Western art music. The two strands were quickly audible in the String Quartet No. 3. First came spare, open music suggesting an Oriental atmosphere. Soon, it was shattered by jagged, constricted melodic phrases.

Sheng deftly moved between the two musical thoughts, producing intense peaks with the more Western idioms and intimate resolutions with the other.

The Shanghai members - three Chinese born, the other from Ann Arbor, Mich. -- played the music beautifully, as they did the evening's other two works.

The ensemble made Mozart's Quartet in D Major, K. 499, Huffmeister, an exquisite display of musical classicism. The texture was crystalline, the phrasing carefully but fluidly refined.

In general, the performance had a highest quality drawing-room elegance, which suggested the Shanghai is establishing its own distinct but fairly quiet voice (particularly in comparison with the groups less consistent 1997 Houston performance).

The players carried the same qualities into the Dvorak's Quartet in A-flat Major, Op. 105.

Neither as pungent nor as inspired as, say, his American Quartet, this piece nonetheless became charming and relaxing entertainment through the Shanghai's musicianship.

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