From The Newark Star-Ledger

Sunday afternoon's concert at Montclair State University's Kasser Theater, the Shanghai Quartet's second in its six-concert cycle of Beethoven quartets, offered much insight into the nature of this quartet -- and the nature of playing Beethoven as well. First, there is a marvelous discipline that pervades the Shanghai Quartet's playing. It's a calm, authoritative sense of focus, not a cold winnowing of emotion but a clear, shared view of the relative priority of score, tone and expression. There are very few loose threads or unsewn edges in their playing, and what they play, they play with clarity. For Beethoven's Quartet in D (Op. 18, No. 3), the composer's earliest quartet, those qualities came in handy in sketching the fairly conservative architecture of an optimistic young man's score. On Sunday, one could feel the composer grappling with a form inherited from Haydn and Mozart, and filling it confidently. Ah, but the more unhappy and disappointed Beethoven became, the more interesting his music was. Hence the downright lugubriousness of the second movement of the Quartet in F minor (Op. 95, No. 11), from Beethoven's so-called "Middle Period" (circa 1810, when the perpetual bachelor approached middle age and began to realize marriage might not be in his future). The self-named "Serioso" quartet is oddly dubbed -- even when Beethoven thought he was being funny, he tended toward the ponderous, so the idea of feeling the need to proclaim one quartet as more "serious" in nature than another is more neurotic than musically accurate. The Shanghai Quartet, starting its 23rd season, did not fail to capture the importance of the more raw emotions expressed or the beginning of disintegration of harmony and architecture found in the work. In their 30s and 40s, the four players of the Shanghai Quartet (violinists Weigang Li and Yi-Wen Jiang, violist Honggang Li and cellist Nicholas Tzavaras) are themselves approaching middle age, so perhaps they identified with the composer's self-reflection. Yet this was still a cerebral agony for Beethoven, in spite of the score's bitter emotional edge, and the Shanghai Quartet seemed neutral as interpreters, offering a fairly straight reading of the work. It was not until the Quartet in A minor (Op. 132, No. 15), among the final that Beethoven wrote, that this quartet seemed to really find its interpretive voice. Beethoven was old. He was sick and recovering. He no longer cared as much about form as about faithfully expressing his thoughts. The central movement of the five-movement quartet, a hymn of thanksgiving, is among the oddest Beethoven wrote, thrusting an ancient-sounding form written in the antique Lydian mode in between turgid and ruggedly forward-looking movements. Here was the perfect litmus test for the Shanghai Quartet, and they rose to the occasion with a fascinatingly tender and vulnerable interpretation of the movement. In this moment, the onstage quartet took ownership of the program and, rather than respectfully rendering Beethoven unto the audience, made his score expressively their own. It was a terrific watershed moment, which hopefully will now flavor the four remaining programs to come.

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