Aussie violin star Ray Chen dazzles and delights in his return home

Aussie violin star Ray Chen brought the house down with four concerts in the revamped Opera House concert hall.

Ray Chen appeared in four concerts with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Picture John Mac

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When British composer Max Richter “recomposed” Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons a decade ago it became a sensation on streaming platforms and introduced a new generation of listeners to classical music.

Ten years on and he has re-recomposed it with The New Four Seasons, and that album has been on high rotation in my home for the past couple of months.

“I don’t see this as a replacement, but it is another way of looking at the material. It’s like shining a light through something from a fresh angle. There’s a romance about it, as if a layer of dust has been blown off,” Richter says of this latest project.

Another musician who is engaging with a younger demographic and blowing off some dust, both through performance and as something of a social media star, is 33-year-old Taiwanese-Australian violinist Ray Chen who is back in Australia and has been performing with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra two programs, including Richter’s first Vivaldi revamp.

All four concerts were led by the talented 35-year-old Kiwi conductor Gemma New, who recently took over as New Zealand Symphony’s first female artistic director.

Chen, with his good looks, Armani suits and sporting his fourth Stradivarius, fills concert halls throughout the world and never fails to bring the house down and the Friday night concert in the newly reopened concert hall was no exception.

Max Richter’s ‘recomposed’ version of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons was performed by Ray Chen.

But before he took the stage New led the orchestra in a performance of Control by American composer Nico Muhly. Like Richter, Muhly is a prolific writer of film and TV soundtracks but this work is for the concert hall and was written in 2016 for the Utah Symphony. It is in five parts, each one inspired by Utah’s landscape, birds and history and is Muhly’s tribute to the great French composer Olivier Messiaen who wrote Des Canyons aux Etoiles after staying in the area in 1972.

The rich tapestry of orchestral sounds and textures emphasised the stunning new acoustics of the Opera House hall which has just had a $150 million makeover. Muhly’s is a radiant sound world with unexpected combinations of instruments – a solo oboe wandering through the canyons while trombones and tuba growl in contrast to bold statements from piano and percussion. Messiaen’s famous bird songs are there with piccolo prominent among the woodwinds and the strings and muted trumpets all contribute their vivid colours.

New kept precise control of her forces in a score which featured complex time signatures, pauses and stop-start passages.

Chen dazzled in the second half with a top-notch performance of the Richter work which ditches a lot of the virtuoso solo passages and brings a minimalist approach to much of the material. The great ritornello passages, especially the faster full orchestra pieces – the summer storm, autumn hunt and winter ice and wind – become compellingly rhythmical and catchy with Richter’s treatment.

The SSO strings were in magnificent form under concertmaster Andrew Haveron and Chen was given a standing ovation.

He returned for an encore – a spectacular reading of the prelude from Eugene Ysaye’s Sonata No.2.

DETAILS

• CONCERT SSO with Ray Chen: Max Richter The Four Seasons Recomposed

• WHERE Sydney Opera House Concert Hall

• WHEN August 20