From The Richmond Times-Dispatch

Thursday, March 30, 2000 by Clarke Bustard

The Shanghai Quartet marked its 10th anniversary at the University of Richmond last night by introducing music thats recalls the darkest years of the recent history of China, homeland of three of the ensembles.

"Silent Temple," the Fourth String Quartet of the Chinese-American composer Bright Sheng, evokes the atmosphere and historical echos of an abandoned Buddhist monastary that Sheng visited during the Cultural Revolution, tha Maoist campaign to eradicate Western influences and traditional Chinese culture.

This compact and extraordinarily intense four-movement work can be heard as representational music, as monks' chants and the plucked string slides of Chinese fiddles are interrupted and ultimately dispersed by the stark chords in march time, representing the invading Red Guards.

The composer prefers to cast it as a recollection filtered through the imagination into music - "almost like in a dream," he said in introductory remarks last night.

The Shanghai, which received the finished score just 10 days ago, played with deep concentration and apparent ease in negotiating Shengs complex textures and juxtapositions of tone and resonant silence.

"Silent Temple," which the ensemble will play again April 19 at the Freer Gallery in Washington (the Freer and UR co-commisioned the work), sounds on the first hearing to be a potent sequel-in-miniature to Sheng's best known work, "H'un (Lacerations): In Memorium, 1966-1976," a symphonic sound portrait of the Cultural Revolution written in 1989.

The Shanghai - Violinists Weigang Li and Yiwen Jiang, violist Hongang Li and cellist James Wilson - bracketed last nights premiere with two staples of their repertory: Beethoven's Quartet in C minor Op. 18, No. 4, and Mozart's Quartet in D Major, K. 499.

Their performance of the Beethoven was an object lesson in the generation of tension not with volume or speed but through the judicious use of rhythmic accents and dynamism and expressive exploitation of harmonic changes.

The ensemble played the Mozart, a warmer, lighter artifact of this composer as master craftsman rather than inspired melodist, to the Nth degree of elegance. The interplay of tunes and figures sounded like the musical equivalent of four perfectly formed, perfectly graceful felines at play.

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