Wu Man, one of the foremost pipa players in the world, has recently been working closely with Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road project. Today she’ll appear with the Shanghai Quartet in a concert mixing modern classical and ancient stringed instruments.
“Whenever you add an instrument to a string quartet, it changes the whole sound of the ensemble. Pipa is no different,” said Weigang Li, first violinist for the Shanghai Quartet, which is in its 32nd season. “It is a plucking instrument, and the sound itself is very foreign to most Westerners.” (The pipa, sometimes called the Chinese lute, dates back about 2,000 years.)
Five Seasons by Lei Liang was commissioned for the Shanghai Quartet and Man. It has a characteristic pipa line that is meant to sound improvised, although it is mostly planned out ahead of time.
“The piece is going to open a new sound palette that the audience has never heard before. You can almost hear ancient China in the middle section. You hear these simple chords and subdued, long lines with the pipa improvising above it,” Li said. “It’s quite intriguing.”
The program continues with something completely different — Bartok’s String Quartet No. 5. Bartok is part of a lineage of Western composers who are known for their string quartets. “Normally people say the most important composer of quartets was Joseph Haydn because he invented the medium, then Beethoven, who wrote quartets all his life. Bartok was simply in love with Beethoven’s quartets, especially his late quartets,” Li said.
Bartok embraced many styles as a composer and, with each new compositional shift, he would write a new string quartet. Altogether he composed six string quartets. His fifth string quartet is in arch form with five movements. The middle movement is, in typical Bartok fashion, a Bulgarian folk dance in an irregular meter. “The fifth quartet is by far the most difficult quartet to put together,” Li said. “Sometimes I think it’s impossible, but somehow we still play it.”
7:30 p.m. Asia Society Texas Center, 1370 Southmore. For information, call 713-524-7601 or visit dacamera.com. $40.
Tue., April 21, 7:30 p.m., 2015
This article appears in Apr 16-22, 2015.