Last year, he made his debuts with the
Cleveland Orchestra and the Los Angeles
Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl.
Followed by nearly one million people
on SoundCloud, Ray Chen looks to
expand the classical music audience by
its appeal to the young generation via all
available social media platforms.
Born in Taiwan and raised in Australia, Mr. Chen was accepted to the
Curtis Institute of Music at age 15,
where he studied with Aaron Rosand.
He plays the 1702 "Lord Newlands"
Stradivarius violin on loan from the
Nippon Music Foundation.
Ray Chen is making his BSO debut.
DOWNTOWN
DINING
AT ITS
FINEST.
About the concert:
Violin Concerto in D Major, opus 35
Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Born in Votkinsk, Russia, May 7, 1840; died in
St. Petersburg, Russia, November 6, 1893
Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto belongs to
that illustrious group of masterpieces that
were savaged by uncomprehending critics
at their premieres. Nearly all the critics
at its first performance — in Vienna on
December 4, 1881 with Russian violinist
Adolf Brodsky as soloist backed by the
Vienna Philharmonic — gave the work
negative reviews, but the one penned
by the notoriously conservative Eduard
Hanslick was so vicious it stung Tchaikovsky for years after. “Tchaikovsky is
surely no ordinary talent, but rather, an
inflated one …lacking discrimination and
taste. …The same can be said for his new,
long, and ambitious Violin Concerto. …
The violin is no longer played; it is tugged
about, torn, beaten black and blue.”
Hanslick demolished the finale “that
transports us to the brutal and wretched
jollity of a Russian church festival. We
see a host of savage, vulgar faces, we hear
crude curses, and smell the booze.”
Because of its flamboyant language and
mind-boggling wrong-headedness, this is
the review that has come down to us from
a city that was generally unsympathetic to
Tchaikovsky’s Russian intensity. A much
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May– June 2014 |
O v ertur e
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