At the National Concert Hall, the National Symphony Orchestra’s invited soloist has taken the stage. It’s a young man who, violin tucked under the chin, is hitting some show-stopping high notes in a difficult concerto. At full tilt, he looks almost hypnotized. He also appears to be in good form, literally — his muscles flex impressively and his slicked-back hair is an alluring hue, made up of all the shades of the dark side of the moon.
This is Ray Chen (陳銳), 25, a former prodigy who has become one of the classical music industry’s brightest virtuosos.
In 2008, he won the Yehudi Menuhin Competition, followed by the Queen Elisabeth Competition the next year. Since graduating from the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia in 2010, he has recorded regularly, most recently an all-Mozart album with the great German conductor Christoph Eschenbach. He also performs at sold-out concerts across the globe, as a professional, touring classical violinist.
Photo courtesy of NTCH
But Chen is also not the traditional touring classical violinist. Compared to most icons of this industry, his image is fresh and quite diverse. He Tweets avidly, under the tagline “Musician. Violinist. Amateur Fashionista. Gourmet Food Hunter.” Online and off, he sings the songs of many brands: Gatsby hair products, Fiat automakers, Armani, the Cleo Restaurant in West Hollywood.
“Not too sure how fellow violinist Joshua Bell keeps his boyish looks at his current age of 45,” he writes on his blog. “Must be all the Clinique and Biotherm skin-care products working hard on keeping up that elasticity!”
GOING CORPORATE
Photo courtesy of NTCH
Chen doesn’t bother to downplay his corporate sponsorships, trumpeting them instead with a zeal that gives old-school classical audiences a double take. He says he loves most aspects of life as a touring violinist, from the sponsors to wardrobes to the parties to the hotel rooms.
“Initially violin was just for fun, but when I was eight, I was invited to Nagano Winter Olympics in Japan, to play in the opening ceremony,” he says.
“It showed me the happiness of being a touring violinist — taking planes, eating new foods, meeting new people. I fell in love with that new experience.”
Born in Taipei, Chen immigrated to Australia as an infant with his parents. At three years old, he was handed a toy guitar that he tucked under his chin and tried to play with a chopstick. When his parents noticed, they signed him up for violin lessons, but didn’t expect much to come from it, he says. It was Chen who wanted to go professional.
“In my house, it was very free. We could choose what we wanted to do,” he says.
“My mother supported me. When I didn’t want to practice, she said, ‘Oh. All right, then don’t.’ I would think, ‘Really?’ and would go back to practicing.”
Now, at 25, he is an established classical musician who is getting interested in genre crossover. Last year, he attended Milan Fashion Week under the wing of Georgio Armani and showed up smartly attired, armed with a violin for a backstage concert. Next year with Israeli mandolinist Avi Avital, he will begin a new fusion project to blend Bach, Chinese folk and klezmer, a Yiddish dance tradition. In the meantime, he’ll keep jetting across the globe on tour.
That’s his career, and for now, it is exactly the way he likes it.
In Taipei, he is rehearsing Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D Major, the breakout piece on which he won the Queen Elisabeth in 2009. He has performed it since he was 13 and revisited it over and over.
“The score is the same, but the way you look at it changes as you age,” he says. “The thing with classical music is you can always keep looking at it and seeing different things.”
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