Area audiences at classical music concerts have seemed especially enthusiastic lately. One doesn’t think of string quartets whipping listeners into frenzies of applause, whoops and shrieks, but that happened after each of three pieces on the Shanghai Quartet concert Monday night.
Presented at Southern Methodist University’s Caruth Auditorium, this was the final concert in the Dallas Chamber Music Society’s 80th season. The program framed the late Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki’s Third String Quartet, subtitled Leaves of an Unwritten Diary, with two Beethoven quartets.
Although the Shanghai Quartet was established in 1983, only first violinist Weigang Li remains from the original ensemble. The other current are second violinist Angelo Xiang Yu, violist Honggang Li and cellist Sihao He.
Penderecki attracted early attention with works of densely textured dissonance, with lots of instrumental special effects. His adolescence shadowed by World War II, he became, as Bernard Holland wrote in The New York Times, “our most skillful purveyor of anxiety, foreboding and depression.”
Although the title was an afterthought, his 1961 Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, for 52 strings, remains one of his most famous works. He went on to compose symphonies, concertos and operas, and his music was used in films including The Exorcist and The Shining.
By 2008, when he penned his Third Quartet, Penderecki had long since relaxed his compositional style. The 15-minute piece lives up to its diary-leaves title in stream-of-consciousness cross-cuts among cries of pain, trotting figures, scurries, chatters, buzzings and rough jerks. But it also its suggestions of a waltz and a Roma tune Penderecki’s father had sung.
Having played the work’s premiere, the Shanghai Quartet delivered it Monday with fiercely focused intensity.
The dramatic intensity imposed on the Beethoven quartets wasn’t always as convincing. Haydn was still alive, and Mozart had been dead only a few years, when Beethoven penned the early B-flat major Quartet (Op. 18, No. 6). Only rarely does a fortissimo appear, and only briefly.
The Shanghai’s performance left no doubt of the four musicians’ technical command and taut ensemble. But some of the vehemence was better suited to Prokofiev or Shostakovich.
In early Beethoven, especially, surely accents don’t want to be so gruffly bowed — as particularly by He — that actual pitches get obscured. Assiduous interpretations of the scherzo and final Allegretto quasi allegro seemed to me to miss the music’s smiles, the playfulness. But quiet playing, sometimes with minimal vibrato, was haunting.
The big-boned approach somehow worked better in the C major Razumovsky Quartet (Op. 59, No. 3). But cello pluckings in the second movement were sometimes too aggressive, and the Menuetto wanted more feeling of the underlying three-beat meter. Just because you can play the finale at such a death-defying tempo — and do so with absolute assurance — doesn’t mean it best serves the music.
The audience, though, obviously loved it. The reward was the dreamy Cavatina from Beethoven’s B-flat major Quartet (Op. 130), beautifully played.