Shanghai Quartet - The Flowing Stream - Chinese Folk Songs and Tone Poems by Zhou Long (1998)

Since its New York debut at Town Hall in the spring of 1987, the Shanghai Quartet has been hailed by press and public alike as one of the leading quartets of its generation. The Shanghai now performs annually in major music centers throughout the U.S. and abroad. The quartet has released a number of recordings on Delos, featuring mainly traditional repertoire, but in The Flowing Stream they present the more exotic music that has been casting a spell over their live audiences in recent years. The CD can be divided into three parts, all arranged by Chinese composer Zhou Long: eight folk songs; tone poems as realized in the haunting Poems from Tang; and Soul, an original composition that combines a Chinese traditional instrument with the Western string quartet. All sections provide the listener with a broad palette of Chinese music, crisscrossing the boundaries between high and low culture, Western ideals and Chinese sentiment.