From The Washington Post

When the Shanghai Quartet came to the area Saturday afternoon, it bypassed its usual Washington venues and landed at Springfield's Kirkwood Presbyterian Church, where it gave a free, world-class performance as part of the Concerts From Kirkwood series.

What is most striking about this New Jersey-based quartet is not the way it whizzes through virtuosic passages without a hair out of place but how it runs a fine-tooth comb through minuscule details in each work it plays. Such fastidious attention yielded an elegantly stylish performance of Haydn's String Quartet in G, Op. 76, No. 1. Violinists Weigang Li and Yi-Wen Jiang, violist Honggang Li and cellist Nicholas Tzavaras played as one with precise musicality and keen expression. They punctuated sections with such captivating pauses that one dared not breathe until the music resumed. With balanced amounts of wit and drama, the quartet allowed Haydn's compositional genius to emerge.

Fred Cohen's String Quartet No. 1, composed in 2001, is a five- movement work full of jarring, rhythmic moments that seemingly depict the explosive formation and demise of a star. But in between the turbulent sections lie two lyrical hymns that, in this quartet's hands, were lovingly fragile and epiphanic. Throughout the second hymn, the instrumentalists produced a shimmery tone that would sound familiar to anyone who has made a wineglass hum. Worldly

wisdom and tonal warmth underscored Dvorak's String Quartet, Op. 96, "American." The rugged and bucolic melodies evoked a sweet nostalgia that the quartet embraced to the end.

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