REVIEW

Chen Yi woos with a seductive and distinctive 'Beauty'

Joshua Kosman, Chronicle Music Critic
Tuesday, March 18, 2008

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.

"From the Path of Beauty," commissioned by Chanticleer and the Shanghai Quartet to mark their 30th and 25th anniversaries, respectively, attempts nothing less than a history of Chinese aesthetics in the space of 40 minutes. And if the specifics of that lineage remained obscure to a listener unversed in the subject, the joy and resourcefulness of Chen Yi's writing remained unmistakable.

The piece, heard Sunday at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, unfolds in seven movements, each one devoted to a different period in Chinese history and a different aesthetic approach. Unlike the composer's other choral works, this one uses no poetic texts, instead calling for the 12-member male chorus to sing wordless syllables in counterpoint to the string quartet.

The quartet writing is often sparse and pictorial, full of short, skittering melodic fragments and tart pizzicatos. For the chorus, Chen Yi adapts the close-knit vocal textures pioneered by György Ligeti to produce a diverse range of harmonies and physically dense sonorities.

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."

Audio samples of Chanticleer's performances are available at chanticleer.org/concerts_seehear.html.

E-mail Joshua Kosman at jkosman@sfchronicle.com.

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This article appeared on page E - 8 of the San Francisco Chronicle