Ray Chen: Player 1

The Strad Issue: January 2025

Description: Commitment and tonal beauty can’t overcome the mismatch on this album

Musicians: Ray Chen (violin) Royal Philharmonic Orchestra/Cristian Măcelaru

Works: Music by Powell, Masuda, Kataoka, Korngold, Jae-Il, Tanzil and Obata

Catalogue number: DECCA 4870322 

The big question behind Taiwanese–Australian violin superstar, entrepreneur and online sensation Ray Chen’s downright bizarre mix of Korngold’s sumptuous 1945 Violin Concerto with rearrangements of tunes from TV, film and video games is: why?

Perhaps, laudably, it’s to encourage younger admirers to immerse themselves in Korngold’s lush, luscious Violin Concerto by tempting them with tunes they might already know well. And it’s surely a work that Chen was born to play, and an ideal vehicle for his rich, vibrato-laden playing and his deep sense of emotional commitment and expression. Maybe, conversely, it’s to point up connections between the older piece and those more recent offerings – although there’s quite a contrast between the kaleidoscopic colours and thematic suppleness of Korngold’s concerto and the far less complex music Chen draws (mostly) from more modern media.

Those shorter pieces – and some of them really are very short – provide another effective platform for Chen’s strongly projected playing: Eunike Tanzil’s unapologetically sentimental Serenade, for example, gets a touchingly tearjerking reading, while arranger Andrew Skeet’s intricate, witty and hilariously souped-up orchestral reworking of the original computer-generated tones in ‘Pallet Town’ from Nintendo game Pokémon Red is surprisingly moving. But despite unwaveringly committed playing from the RPO under Cristian Măcelaru, and despite Chen’s own evident enthusiasm and conviction, Player 1 nonetheless feels like two entirely separate projects shoehorned – rather bewilderingly – into one, resulting in a release that does little justice to either of them.

DAVID KETTLE