Player 1

Ray Chen articulates many emotions on his eclectic album of themes from film, television and video games, but one feeling that binds them all is a sense of nostalgia. “Everything here is something that I’ve loved since I was a kid,” the Taiwanese Australian violinist tells Apple Music Classical. “That influence on me has been huge and has shaped me into the person that I am today.” The yearningly reflective track “Sadness & Sorrow” reflects his memories of the Japanese anime TV series Naruto. Then there’s his fondness for the console video game The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, the theme of which rubs shoulders here with the music from Pokémon. And at the centre of the album is Erich Korngold’s cinematic Violin Concerto, which Chen studied with the great Aaron Rosand at the prestigious Curtis Institute: based on the composer’s own film scores of the 1930s, it is an orchestral masterpiece rich with Romanticism and an air of longing. “Korngold was the, one could say, ‘Original Gangster’ film score composer, who brought the tradition from Europe to Hollywood,” says Chen. “He has influenced so many others, like John Williams, and across different genres too, including animation, anime and gaming.” As with the anime and film scores, Chen embraces a narrative approach to the Korngold, imagining scenes for each movement in his interpretation of the Concerto. The first, he says, is incredibly romantic: “it’s a lush environment, and you’re there and nature is blooming,” he says. The second movement is “looking up at the stars—it’s very wistful, a sense of yearning for someone far away. It’s like that long-distance relationship type ‘Are you thinking of me as I’m thinking of you?’.” The third movement, he says, reminds him of cowboys, “but then there’s some sort of space element, probably because I always associate it with John Williams’ score for Star Wars. It’s like Indiana Jones meets Star Wars.” Also featured on the album is the wistful Serenade, an original work by LA-based composer Eunike Tanzil, whom Chen first contacted after watching her “Hum Me A Melody” series on Instagram, in which she asks people on the street to sing a melody that she then transforms in her studio into a fully orchestrated short score. When it came to the Serenade, explains Chen, he approached the music the same way that he approaches online content creation. “The first five seconds had to grab people’s attention,” he explains, “and we wanted to imagine how people will use this audio on social media. But instead of simply coming up with a melody, we thought, ‘OK, let’s imagine something romantic. People are having a dinner date—they’re in Europe, something like that.’ That’s how we arrived at this waltz.” For a concert violinist who has won the prestigious Yehudi Menuhin and Queen Elisabeth music competitions, these shorter pieces hold little technical challenge for Chen (“being a classical musician prepares you for the worst!”). But the melancholic theme tune from the TV series Squid Game was a late addition to the album, leaving Chen with little time to prepare. “Once you get in that mode and you stop taking a whole year to learn one concerto, you start to be able to do it on the fly,” he says—helped, no doubt, by his online practise challenge: to learn and record a piece of music in 30 minutes… It’s just one of the ways in which Chen has matured and adapted to the digital age as a violinist. “As classical musicians we always start at the traditional point,” he says. “You learn the tradition, you learn through the most conservative approach. But then as the years go by you see how you fit in.”