The Lenard Chamber Music Series has seen some great performances this year, and with the spring semester closing up, it’s time for one last concert. For the last performance of the season, we have Ray Chen, the famous virtuoso violinist, performing at the Jorgensen Center for Performing Arts tonight.
Chen was accepted into the Curtis Institute of Music, one of the most prestigious music schools in the country responsible for teaching America’s most skilled musicians, at just 15 years old. Since then, he has played in the best orchestras worldwide and won many impressive awards. His concerts have amassed hundreds of thousands of audience members, and his talent has landed him positions as an ambassador for SONY Electronics and a music consultant for Riot Games, the studio behind League of Legends.
He’s used his talent to inspire a new generation of classical music lovers by engaging with people through his internet platforms. His videos ranging from violin tutorials to classical music-themed tier lists and challenges have amassed almost five hundred thousand subscribers on YouTube and 900,000 followers on Instagram. His most popular video on YouTube has been watched 13 million times. Believe it or not, it is a 23-second clip of him playing the violin to two horses.
Tonight, Chen will be joined by Julio Elizalde on the piano, a great musician who frequently tours with Chen. Their program includes Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 7 and Bach’s Partita No. 3, and it is hinted that works by composers such as Dvořák, Bazzini and Corea will be played.
Beethoven’s seventh violin sonata is an important work for violin and piano. It was published in the early years of his hearing loss, and as a result, is filled with emotions associated with the impending loss of a musician’s most important sense. The first movement, written in a form that pits two melodies against each other, is filled with turmoil and struggle in a brave display of force. While still loosely following the style of Mozart and Haydn, this piece is a prelude to the emergence of the Romantic movement and showcases Beethoven’s contribution to this style where emotion and expression triumph over reason and order in music.
Bach, who many might know for his works on the keyboard or his religious music, was also a great violinist. This work is strictly for solo violin, which means no piano accompaniment at all. Still, using just four strings and a bow, Bach’s compositional and musical skills create a thoroughly interesting piece. His music carries an improvisatory tone as melodies and patterns come back and forth in unexpected ways, and his usage of different ranges of the violin in close succession gives the impression of multiple voices being played at once as if one performer were two or three at the same time. The beginning of the piece may be familiar to those who had an old Nokia phone, as it was used for one of their ringtone presets.
These are all the pieces that we know about, so if this sounds intriguing to you, then make sure to attend tonight! As always, through the Lenard Chamber Music Endowment Fund, all students with a valid UConn ID can attend the event for free. See you there!