Friday 21 October 2016

Ray Chen - a great ambassador for music

The 27-year old violinist Ray Chen pranced on the Dewan Filharmonik Petronas (DFP) concert-hall stage. As he took a brief break during the rehearsal of the tutti parts of the 3rd movement Rondo: Allegro of Beethoven's Violin Concerto, he seemed relaxed but was poised like tiger waiting to pounce for his next entry.

After a solid 45 minutes of rehearsing this movement, conductor Gabor Takács-Nagy and Chen seemed pleased with their efforts and the rehearsal with the MPO drew to a close, eliciting a warm and sustained round of applause from the members of the orchestra. Ever the perfectionist, Chen stays back on the stage to practise the complex first movement cadenza alone before we are able to meet for the interview.

Chen is pleasantly surprised with the lovely acoustics of DFP concert hall, this being his first visit to Malaysia - a country of very warm people in his opinion. He is to present Beethoven's Violin Concerto, a masterwork and key staple of the repertoire with the MPO on 21 and 22 October.


I ask him about the Olympian Beethoven concerto that he would be presenting. "The Beethoven concerto is very different from the earlier violin concertos of Mozart say. The Mozart concertos are generally very light and happy, but the Beethoven has a solidness and gravitas as well as light and shade whilst respecting the earlier composers' tradition for violin concertos," says Chen.

Tradition also plays another part in what Chen will do with the Beethoven concerto in Kuala Lumpur. He will be using the Leopold Auer cadenzas in all the 3 movements. Chen's teacher at the Curtis Institute, Aaron Rosand was a student of Efrem Zimbalist, who was in turn a pupil of the famed Russian teacher Leopold Auer, who also taught Jascha Heifetz. According to Chen, the cadenzas that he will be playing are a derivative of the Auer-Heifetz-Rosand version.

Another interesting link back to tradition is that Chen now plays the 1715 Joseph Joachim Stradivarius, on loan from the Nippon Music Foundation. Coincidentally, it was the 13-year old Joachim who revived the Beethoven Violin Concerto in London in 1844 after much neglect in the composer's lifetime.


Chen's current two main musical priorities lie in maintaining his concertizing at the key musical centres of the world at a very high professional level as well as engaging the younger generation of music lovers and fans via social media. Spreading the love of classical music and reaching out is Chen's prime passion and musical mission.


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