By Hugh Robertson

“It’s not just the Armani suits, cool good looks and captivating stage manner that guarantees full houses and standing ovations, he is also much admired for his innate musicianship and poetic sensibility. His performances…are guaranteed special events that stay in the memory.”

Limelight hit the nail on the head when describing the phenomenon that is Taiwanese-Australian violinist Ray Chen. Since bursting onto the scene with wins in prestigious competitions while still a teenager, Chen has made as big an impact as any soloist in recent decades. Through acclaimed performances, award-winning recordings, appearances in TV shows, a multi-year partnership with Giorgio Armani and hundreds of thousands of followers on social media who hang on his every note, Chen is reimagining what it means to be an international soloist in the 21^st century.

Sydney audiences will get several opportunities to hear Chen in July, in two unique programs that demonstrate exactly why he has shot to the very pinnacle of the music world. One is Play with Ray (25 July), a concert format designed by Chen himself, in which violinists from around the world audition for a chance to perform with Chen and one of the world’s leading orchestras. Announced in late 2022, hundreds of musicians from around the world sent in audition tapes, and three will be hand-picked by Chen to perform Bach’s famous Double Violin Concerto on stage at the Sydney Opera House, with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. The winners will be announced shortly – watch this space!

Two weeks earlier, Sydney gets to experience what would be a headline event anywhere in the world. Chen will perform as soloist in Tchaikovsky’s extraordinary Violin Concerto, conducted by former Sydney Symphony Chief Conductor David Robertson, who will also lead the Orchestra in Danish composer Carl Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony and the world premiere of a work by Australian composer Alice Chance, Through Changing Landscape.

It's not just audiences who are excited to see Chen in Sydney. David Robertson is thrilled to finally get a chance to work with the violinist, after several missed connections. “I've been a fan of his for years,” says Robertson, “and it's just never quite worked out that we got to do things together. But finally I get a chance to work with him!

“His love of music is infectious, and his technique is sky high – there are no barriers with what he can do.”

It is hard to think of a piece better suited to Chen’s combination of rich, muscular technique and thrilling, virtuosic energy. Written in 1878, Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto is one of the supreme examples of the genre, full of deep feeling and emotion, rich orchestral colours and ending in a blaze of spectacular violin fireworks. It is also singularly, uniquely Tchaikovsky, the composer best-known for his exquisite ballets Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker (which, coincidentally, you can hear performed by the Sydney Symphony with Chief Conductor Simone Young the week before Chen performs the concerto.)

“It’s ballet, right?” says Chen. “The Tchaikovsky is all about upward motion, getting airtime – right from the start of the first movement. There is all this graceful elegance, and it creates this Tinkerbell-like effect. It sparkles. But it's not in-your-face sparkles, it’s beautiful. It’s luminescent.”

“It's a combination of being totally a showpiece, and yet at the same time is completely lyrical and able to touch one on a kind of intimate basis,” says Robertson. “While there is certainly grandstanding, Tchaikovsky never relinquishes this very deep contact with the listener.”

Robertson is certainly no stranger to the piece, having conducted it countless times around the world. But no matter how many times he has performed it, there is always more richness to discover.

"In a work like this, what's fascinating for me is to see just how many different approaches there are," says Robertson. "It's like the Blue Mountains – where do you want to walk? Are you going to start out at the Three Sisters? Are you going to transverse from the other side from the caves and come back? There are all of these different possibilities and fresh viewpoints, even when you know the place really well.

“That’s why it's fun to do the same piece with different soloists. It’s not as though there is one way to do it, and this person 'does it the best' end of story.

“No two performances are alike. The places the piece can go are as varied as the number of human beings that are in the concert hall.”

Chen also has a long history with the Tchaikovsky concerto. It was the first concerto he ever performed with an orchestra, back when he won the Australian National Youth Concerto Competition at just 13 years of age. It was also the piece with which he won the world-famous Queen Elisabeth Competition in Belgium in 2009, which brought him to international attention.

“For me, this was my big coming of age piece,” says Chen. “It's very heroic and noble – it’s like a hero's journey. And when I started playing it, you’re just so consumed by it the whole time.

“And then after I won the Queen Elizabeth with the Tchaikovsky, everyone wants to hear you play it – but also nobody has confidence in you to play anything else,” he says with a laugh. “You are getting invited for the Tchaikovsky or you're out! I probably played it 50 times, and I recorded it as well. But after that I just had to set it aside. I haven't played it all that often recently.”

Over the course of their careers, a musician's relationship to a certain piece of music naturally evolves. Some changes are obvious, and decisive, but most are a slow accumulation of experience, as an artist ages and grows, and reflects that back into their music. Chen, although still only 34, has been experiencing something of that recently.

“As I've started to slowly revisit the concerto again over the past month, the important thing is to explore it very carefully so that you don’t fall into your old grooves,” reveals Chen. “You want to do everything with intention, to question everything, to ask yourself, ‘why was I doing that?’

“And as you go through it, and then do it again, slowly it moulds into a new form. Then you let it set, and then you come back to it, and then you do the same thing again. So there is this constant moulding that is applied – a gentle moulding in the beginning, and then you go harder and harder, and then you set it in the new groove.”

Conductors go through the same process, of course, although with concertos there is the added difficulty of having to marry your own vision of a piece with that of the soloist. But that is a dance that David Robertson knows very well.

“Well I'm married to a soloist, so I happen to know that the soloist is always right,” he says with a laugh, speaking of his life with American pianist. “It just creates a domestic harmony that you don't get any other way.

“When you do a concerto, you can't learn the piece and then set it in concrete, or in stone, because someone else is going to come and they're going to have their ideas. So you need to learn everything about the piece, but also have a learned freedom of what the piece can do.

“My job is to figure out what the various musicians bring to the table, and then blend all of this together. I think that's actually the role of the conductor – not the dictator of how things should be, but rather as the network allowing everyone to interact with each other at the same time.”

And what of the other crucial participants in the concert experience – the audience? What are they to take away from these performances? That is the bit that Chen is especially excited about, and in fact sees the Tchaikovsky concerto as a microcosm of the soloist’s job as the conduit between the orchestra and the audience.

“The soloist is connected in both directions, right? To the orchestra and to the audience,” he says excitedly, his hands becoming more animated as he develops his point. “Some artists stay closer to the audience, others like to stay closer to the orchestra, and within the music. But I like to sway in between.

“Whenever I play I like to think of both groups of people at a concert. People who know the work come and are expecting something, but then something new happens and they notice it – but if you are new to the music you just accept it, right?

“For the newcomers, it’s, ‘Oh, that was incredible!’ While for the more experienced people it’s about subverting expectations – though of course that has to be done in the right way.

“When people leave the concert hall I want them to feel like they have had an experience that you don't get anywhere else. I want my performances to fill a little crevice in your spirit somewhere, in your soul. Just a little bit. It's not going to be everything, right? But it was something, and it got exactly the right part. It completes a part of you.”