Pianist John Chen on tour: French masterpieces played with formidable dynamism

Pianist John Chen communicated brilliantly with his audience in his recent Wellington recital without saying a word.

We're increasingly used to musicians, especially in chamber music, talking from the stage, illuminating the composer's intentions and their own reactions to the music. It can be a good way to strengthen a relationship between performer and audience. Chen proves it unnecessary in his substantial and beautifully played touring recital of music by French composers, mostly from the late 19th century.

Poulenc's popular miniatures, Three Novelettes, are the most recent music of the programme, the first two composed in the early 20th century, the third in 1959. They are nonetheless Romantic works and, played with unfussy charm, make a light and gentle opening to Chen’s concert.

Having shown his skill in highlighting a singing melody above a complex accompanying texture, Chen moves on to his own transcriptions of four songs by Henri Duparc, Poulenc's older compatriot. Presented as Four Mélodies, 'vocal' lines singing through the middle of the texture, these range from the watery delights of the opening boat ride and the tumult of a storm at sea to the anguish of a poignant elegy and finally the rapture of lovers. These "songs without words" are played with a nice sense of narrative and character, flowing legato accompaniments enhanced by judicious pedalling, the whole set revealing a pianist both highly accomplished and marvellously expressive.

The first half of the programme ends with a masterpiece from César Franck, a French composer, pianist and organist born in Belgium. Franck composed his Prelude, Chorale and Fugue during the final decade of his turbulent life, and the work is a tour-de force for the pianist, the music requiring strength and facility with the grandeur of the organ not far away. The lush contrapuntal textures of the final Fugue are highly Romantic, drawing on themes from earlier in the work and demanding all of Chen's abundant virtuosity in a dense construction based on a determined fugue subject.

Chen, who is not yet 40, was a prodigy who began piano lessons at 3 and completed Masters studies at Auckland University when just 18, working with piano pedagogue Rae de Lisle. Soon afterwards, he was the youngest ever winner of the prestigious Sydney International Piano Competition in 2004. Since then he has studied in the US and Germany, but has had an unconventional career path, living for a time in Zambia, teaching mathematics and music in secondary schools there, and now based in Uganda where he is Deputy Principal at Acacia International School. In a 2004 interview for Radio NZ he talked about practising on an electric piano, which is apparently still his method, there being few if any piano technicians in Uganda. 

Pianist John Chen

“…highly accomplished and marvellously expressive.”

Photo credit: Chamber Music New Zealand

Chen has an affinity for French music, and has recorded the complete solo piano works of Henri Dutilleux for Naxos and music by Debussy and Ravel for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. His programme for this New Zealand tour is ambitious, combining some of the finest French works from this period, all performed from memory and with formidable dynamism. Chen is offering an "old school" piano recital, all about the music, with an absence of ego and a marvellous commitment to the composers' intentions. Throughout, his attention to detail is meticulous but never distracts from the big sweep of the compositions and his sense of their architecture.

In the second half of the programme, two works from the 1890’s affirm Chen’s intention to present some of the most substantial French piano works of the period. Gabriel Fauré’s Theme and Variations in C# minor Opus 73 is the composer’s largest solo piano work.

Eleven variations follow the march-like solemnity of Fauré’s theme. Chen offers a staggeringly fine interpretation, his gentle rubato enhancing the dreamier variations, and the beautiful stillness of the ninth giving way to the almost flashy virtuosity Fauré demands for the tenth. In the final variation, Fauré moves to the major key, a brilliant shift, as the composer’s biographer wrote – “the chorale rises from its serenity to a climax of transcendental intensity”.

The recital ends with Camille Saint-Saëns’ “fiendishly difficult” Six Études Opus 111, written just a few years after Fauré’s variations. Chen transcends technical challenges to focus on the character of the music, and here he held the audience rapt with the variety and colour of his playing. The moto perpetuo of the second étude – think ‘Flight-of-the-Bumble-Bee’ – is followed by a homage to J S Bach in the skilfully managed Prelude and Fugue of the third. After tossing off the quirky chromatic thirds of the fifth étude, Chen ends his marvellous recital with full-on Romanticism and dazzling speed in the final Toccata, another moto perpetuo, this time with hints of ragtime and thematic borrowings from Saint-Saëns’ own fifth piano concerto.

There are eleven concerts ahead in Chen’s Chamber Music New Zealand Partnership tour. Run, don’t walk, to buy your tickets to hear this splendid programme, played with outstanding musicianship. Details below.

CMNZ John Chen Solo piano recital, music by French composers. Rotorua (20 June), Kerikeri (22 June), Upper Hutt (26 June), Warkworth (28 June), Whangārei (29 June), Cambridge (3 July), Motueka (4 July), Rangiora (6 July), Ashburton (7 July), Whakātane (26 July), Tauranga (27 July). More details and ticketing links here.

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