Ray Chen

Born in Taiwan in 1989, and raised in Australia, Ray Chen is a violinist noted for his bright, vital playing style. In the late 2000s, he won both the Yehudi Menuhin Violin Competition and the Queen Elisabeth Music Competition before turning 21. Chen subsequently recorded concertos by Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Bruch and Mendelssohn for such labels as Sony Classical and Decca in the 2010s. He plays the 1715 “Joachim” Stradivarius. Chen showed prodigious talent for the violin as a young child; he made his solo debut with the Queensland Philharmonic Orchestra at the age of eight. Just before he turned nine, he performed at the opening celebration concert for the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano. At 15, Chen enrolled at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia where he studied with Aaron Rosand. Four years later, he took first prize at the 2008 Yehudi Menuhin Violin Competition in Cardiff, Wales. In that same year, he made his Russian debut in St Petersburg with Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto alongside the Mariinsky Orchestra. In 2009, he won the Queen Elisabeth Music Competition. Chen signed a recording contract with Sony Classical in 2010, and in early 2011 released his first album, Virtuoso, featuring works by Bach, Franck, Tartini and Wieniawski. He became the youngest artist to perform in a Nobel Prize Concert when he appeared on the 2012 programme. That year, he also released a recording of the Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn Violin Concertos, following it in 2014 with Mozart’s Violin Concertos alongside Christoph Eschenbach and the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival Orchestra. After transferring to Decca in 2017, Chen released his fourth album, The Golden Age (2018) which featured Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1 with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, along with a variety of shorter classical and popular pieces. He has since released several albums, and plays an active role in social media.