Overture Magazine 2013-2014 May-June 2014 | Page 23

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 Make your dinner reservations today by visiting DineDowntownBaltimore.com May– June 2014 | O v ertur e 21