César Franck's most passionate work made a fitting centerpiece for a Valentine's Day program by the Shanghai Quartet and pianist Yuja Wang.
From the very first minute of his Piano Quintet in F minor, when the torrid declarations of the strings are interrupted by the piano's otherworldly meditations, the Shanghai and Wang gave a performance that perfectly interpreted the drama of the music.
Like a Victrola operated by a madman, the music stops and starts, shifts tempo and mood, and modulates between keys and melodic ideas.
The dialogue between human emotion and mechanical action was most clear in the second movement. Wang controlled the rhythmic pulse, at first soft as a heartbeat below her velvety melody and the strings' swooning one. As the movement progressed, the musicians increased the pulse's insistence until it became a pistonlike beat in the strings. Neither Wang nor the quartet backed away from the climax, giving the music not just movement but direction.
Franck's music generally was dismissed by the public in his lifetime. This quintet, dated 1879, has so many passages that could have been lifted by Philip Glass and other late-20th-century composers that Franck's problem may have been that he was a hundred years ahead of his time. In any case, the Shanghai Quartet and Wang brought the music fully alive for this century.
In a departure from the printed program, Wang offered two Domenico Scarlatti sonatas, fresh from her recording session in Hamburg a few weeks ago. She played with such blazing vitality that one wanted to grab the arm of whomever one was sitting beside. The high-energy music suited the constitution of the program better than the originally planned "Vocalise" by Sergei Rachmaninov.
The evening began and ended with pieces that join the worlds of folk music and the performance hall.
The first, "Chinasong: Chinese Folk Songs," brings together various works based on folk melodies, dances and stories, arranged for string quartet by Shanghai Quartet violinist Yi-Wen Jiang. It's a lovely piece, simple but not simplistic, that takes full advantage of both the fibrous and the delicate qualities of the Shanghai's sound. One hopes that other groups in years to come will include it in their standard repertoire.
Antonin Dvorák's Piano Quintet in A Major let the Shanghai musicians dig in and play mightily -- even the melodies of the slower second movement were muscular. Wang's clear, assertive piano complemented the strings' gorgeous texture. Her trills in the final movement sang as a piano too rarely sings.
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