From San Francisco Chronicle

Local music lovers with reasonably long memories will remember the days in the early 1990s when composer Chen Yi walked among us, turning out music of irresistible suavity and allure in her role as composer-in-residence with both Chanticleer and the late, lamented Women's Philharmonic.

She was back in town again over the weekend with a new piece, and the old emotions - excitement, satisfaction, gratitude - surfaced all over again. The seven movements progress from the spare near-unisons of the opening movement, for unaccompanied chorus, through increasingly intricate and ornate musical styles. The fourth movement introduces wide melodic leaps into the palette, while the fifth veers suddenly into a lush harmonic chorale.

One thing that dulls the piece's impact slightly is its limited range of tempo - the first four movements proceed at the same slow, deliberate pace, and even the more energetic writing in the latter sections is tenuous and almost apologetic. But the music's overall effect is as lovely and seductive as its subject matter demands. The second half of Sunday's program was a showcase for the two ensembles separately.

Chanticleer reinforced the Ligeti echoes of the first half with splendid, fine-toned performances of several of the composer's early Hungarian settings, including the folk-like "Pápainé" and the deftly pointed "Magány" ("Solitude"). And Ligeti's influence was highlighted further in Clytus Gottwald's superb a cappella arrangement - at once ethereal and physical - of "Soupir," the first of Ravel's "Three Poems of Stéphane Mallarmé."

The Shanghai Quartet (violinists Weigang Li and Yi-Wen Jiang, violist Honggang Li and cellist Nicholas Tzavaras) concluded the program with a vivid, dry-eyed account of Ravel's F-Major String Quartet, and for an encore Chanticleer returned to join the ensemble for Chen Yi's ebullient "Three Chinese Folksong Arrangements."

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