Beauty and the Machine

The Victrola was still several years shy of existence at the time of Cesar Franck's Piano Quintet in F minor, but its appearance in my review for the Richmond Times-Dispatch of the Shanghai Quartet with Yuja Wang makes metaphorical if not literal sense. I had never heard the Franck before and was struck by its idea, as I heard it, that the mechanical and the beautiful can co-exist, or are not any more different from each other than beauty and menace.