The Golden Age (2018)

performed by Amihai Grosz (viola), Julien Quentin (piano), Made in Berlin, Noah Bendix-Balgley (violin), Ray Chen (violin), Stephan Koncz (cello), London Philharmonic Orchestra, Robert Trevino (conductor)
composed by Australian Traditional, Claude Debussy, Fritz Kreisler, Jascha Heifetz, Max Bruch, Stephan Koncz

Taiwanese-born Australian violinist Ray Chen has moved from Sony to Decca and released The Golden Age as his debut. As the album suggests, the program's subject is the classic age of violin playing in the early 1900s, when the veteran Fritz Kreisler and the young Jascha Heifetz ruled the scene. Yet the mood here is hardly nostalgic. First of all, Chen is muscular and fresh in the centerpiece, the Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 26, of Max Bruch. Sample the breadth of the opening movement's beginning. Chen achieves a ... Read More

Taiwanese-born Australian violinist Ray Chen has moved from Sony to Decca and released The Golden Age as his debut. As the album suggests, the program's subject is the classic age of violin playing in the early 1900s, when the veteran Fritz Kreisler and the young Jascha Heifetz ruled the scene. Yet the mood here is hardly nostalgic. First of all, Chen is muscular and fresh in the centerpiece, the Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 26, of Max Bruch. Sample the breadth of the opening movement's beginning. Chen achieves a hair-trigger tension in many of the big passages, and he has a sense of command in the various Kreisler and Heifetz miniatures along the way -- maybe too much of a sense of command in Schön Rosmarin, which doesn't have the lilt it should. But the second major draw is that there is new music here. Chen plays not only the Bruch concerto and the miniatures with violin and the piano of Julien Quentin, he performs chamber arrangements with his string quartet Made in Berlin. The... Read Less