It’s a little while since Ray Chen played Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. Last time he did, with Seattle Symphony in 2021, things went swimmingly – until they didn’t.

The 34-year-old classical music superstar is back home in Brisbane for two “Ray Plays Tchaikovsky” – The Violin Virtuoso concerts with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra Friday night and Saturday. He’s playing the same piece but hopes there won’t be a repeat of what happened last time.

“I was playing the Tchaikovsky Violin Concert in Seattle when a string on my violin broke,” Chen recalls. “When that happens instinct kicks in and I managed to get through it without missing a beat.”

Look up “violinist string breaks during Tchaikovsky” on YouTube and you can see the whole thing with Ray swapping violins with the concertmaster and playing on with a smile on his face and raised eyebrows.

He talks about it as if it was fun. And if it did happen here – touch wood it won’t – he would seamlessly recover as he did in Seattle.

Chen plays a 1714 “Dolphin” Stradivarius on loan from the Nippon Music Foundation. This instrument was once owned by the famed violinist Jascha Heifetz and is pretty well priceless.

It’s a special instrument for a special musician, a Brissie boy who has conquered the world.

Former Brisbane Grammar School student Ray Chen returns to Brisbane to play with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra this weekend. (Image: Supplied)

Ray Chen was born in Taiwan but then the family relocated to Brisbane when he was little. At the age of eight, Chen performed as a soloist with the Queensland Philharmonic Orchestra, his first appearance at QPAC where he will be playing in the Concert Hall this weekend.

He went on to study at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia as a teenager and is still based in Philadelphia though he does admit wanting to come home and live here again.

“I do miss Brisbane,” he says. “It’s been a year since I was here and that’s too long.”

He has played with orchestras all over the world, sometimes more than 100 concerts a year.

He is known for his energy and charisma and he was an early adopter of social media, building a huge following on Instagram and recently he has created his own app, Tonic, for musicians to share their practice sessions with others all over the world.

“We launched that in February and its going well with almost 60,000 users all over the world,” he says. “Practicing is what we spend most time on. I love sharing practice or performing.”

Chen recalls spending hundreds of hours practicing as a youngster in Brisbane.

“I had an audience then,” he recalls. “It was my mum; I would be there in the kitchen playing for her.” It got him used to an audience, even if it was only an audience of one.

His conductor for the Brisbane concerts is a guest artist too, Costa Rican Giancarlo Guerrero, a six-time Grammy Award winner and, among other things, Music Director of the Nashville Symphony.

The second half of the program features Guerrero conducting Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 8, keeping the Russian theme at a time when the accent on Russian cultural achievements is being overshadowed by war.

Shostakovich symphonies sometimes have a reputation for being intimidating, but with Guerrero providing expert explanations from stage the audience will be taken on a journey into the heart of a composer who used music to express his struggles with the government of his native land, the Soviet Union is his time.

As for Ray’s piece, the program notes suggest that the “Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto is one of those works you really want to hear with a top-notch soloist (and lucky for you, we’ve got one).”

“Tchaikovsky’s attempt at marriage had failed and he left Russia to rest for a while in Switzerland, and composed this music in the company of Iosif Kotek, a violinist and former music student. “I love him very much,” Tchaikovsky confessed in a letter to his brother. “I would have been able to do nothing without him.

“Tchaikovsky expected the public to gossip about the intimacy of his relationship with “Kotik” (“kitten”), so he dedicated the concerto to somebody else.”

The personal details make it all the more intriguing.

“If you didn’t know the story it would just be music about someone’s journey and you could leave it at that,” Ray Chen says. “But it’s interesting to know the background and I think for me there’s definitely this yearning evident in the music and there’s passion and forbidden love. Every note is meaningful because it’s about him and knowing that makes it a more intense experience.”

Let’s just hope the strings on his Stradivarius hold this time around.

qso.com.au