concert review: Stella Chen

Next month I'm scheduled to review violinist Stella Chen in the Barber concerto with SFS. I'd heard Chen before - she was in the Music@Menlo chamber music festival last summer - but I thought I could use more exposure to her style, so I attended her SFS-sponsored violin and piano recital (with George Li, pianist) at Davies.

I was quite pleased with the results. Chen seemed to me to be most outstanding in her command of the melodic line and phrasing, especially in lyrical sections. In fast sequences of figurations, she displays the overall shape of the passage without resorting to the overemphasis of key notes. All this gives character to the music within a fairly strict control of tempo and note values.

Her tone is relatively consistent, though it can change between pieces. Mostly it is light and clear, but she doesn't shift around between tone styles to provide character. I'd describe her as a conservative and restrained violinist who relies on her skill and communicative power within those restrictions to convey the meaning and effectiveness of the music with tremendous virtuosity but without flamboyance. I noted at Menlo her ability to take command of a chamber music piece, and even without an ensemble the same surety is there.

The main item on the program was Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata, a long and rambling piece which, despite taking all the repeats, Chen and Li kept controlled and clearly shaped. It was a most satisfactory performance of a work I usually find difficult to grasp. Schubert's Rondo in B minor seems to me a piece of garrulous fluff, but Chen - who considers Schubert her favorite composer, and she recently issued a CD of his violin music - found the lyricism in it. The third piece was new, No Man's Land Lullaby by Eleanor Alberga, a quiet (and less somber than I was expecting) tribute to the front lines in the World Wars, closing with quotations of fragmentary phrases from the lullaby, the one by Brahms.

Chen is in her early 30s. In speaking to the audience, she expressed delight to be in San Francisco - "I am a Bay Area girl!" she said; she was raised here in Silicon Valley. She gave an excellent if fairly brief show to a gratifyingly large audience.