CSO concertmaster heading to Asia
CSO concertmaster Robert Chen and friends are heading to Asia
The last time Chicago Symphony Orchestra concertmaster Robert Chen played his hometown — Taipei, Taiwan — in 2013, the stakes were rather high. Music director Riccardo Muti abruptly had bowed out of the orchestra’s 2013 Asia tour due to emergency hernia surgery. That meant the CSO had lost a marquee attraction and needed to rethink the expedition at the eleventh hour. So CSO management hit on an ingenious idea: Ask Chen to step up as violin soloist in the city where he was born and spent the first 10 years of his life. The question was whether he would – and whether he could.
The episode plays on Chen’s mind as he prepares to return to Taipei, where the CSO will launch its forthcoming Asia tour on Jan. 19. “There was some last-minute scrambling to get other people to come and play the concerts, and they had to change the program,” recalls Chen of a “stressful” turn of events for musicians and administrators.
Martha Gilmer, then a CSO executive, made the pitch to Chen. “Obviously, when Muti canceled, there was a lot of disappointment,” recalls Gilmer, currently chief executive officer of the San Diego Symphony.
“So we were looking at what would make these concerts very special. And Robert being a native
son, as it were, we felt had a very special sentiment.”
Chen remembers his response. “I said, ‘OK, fine, I’ll step up and do it, take one for the team. … I’ll pull it out of my library and practice little bit and give it a whirl.’”
When the big moment came, “It felt a little bit like a dream,” says Chen, 49. “It was a good response, very enthusiastic. They felt like I’m one of them,” he adds, referring to the Taiwanese audience.
“It was a connection to your own people.”
Or, as Gilmer puts it, “I can’t imagine how proud it must have been for him to stand with his orchestra at that moment. … I think it was a golden moment.”
Chen returned to Taiwan during the CSO’s Asia tour with Muti in 2016. This time around, if all goes as planned, Chen and the orchestra will play tour-opening concerts with their music director in Taipei, the second (Jan. 20) featuring Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherezade.” Muti and the orchestra played the piece majestically last September in Orchestra Hall, the extensive solo passages for violin placing Chen in a spotlight he’ll reclaim when the musicians return to Taipei.
Chen’s “first solo told the story,” I wrote in my review of the CSO performance, “the sweetness of his tone, tautness of his vibrato and sweep of his phrases avoiding sentimentality.”
As Chen and the orchestra get ready to head to Taiwan, though, stress will be coming from another source: international politics. At the start of the New Year, Chinese President Xi Jinping asserted in a speech that Taiwan’s unification with China was “a great trend of history” and warned that “we make no promise to abandon the use of force” to make it happen.
To which Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen responded defiantly a few days later: “It is impossible for me or, in my view, any responsible politician in Taiwan to accept President Xi Jingping’s recent remarks without betraying the trust and the will of the people of Taiwan,” she said in a briefing to foreign reporters.
Into the fray go Chen and the CSO, in a tour that will venture from Taiwan to China and then Japan.
“It’s crazy, the politics of it all now, but we’re cultural ambassadors in a sense,” observes Chen.
“We’re not there to discuss whether Xi is right or whether Trump is right,” he adds, referencing the ongoing trade battle between the two powers. “It’s silly. It’s like watching a fight on a playground a little bit: It always starts with something that is seemingly inconsequential.”
If any force can ameliorate struggles among nations, it’s music, especially when delivered at the level the CSO long has epitomized.
For Chen, the return to Taiwan will be personal, too, evoking memories of a picturesque childhood on the other side of the world.
“Life was pretty idyllic,” he says of his youth in Taipei. “We had a nice little house in the hills and two dogs, a little goldfish pond, some fruit trees in the backyard. … I remember enjoying being in school. It was fun, and there was a rice paddy that was right adjacent to the school. We would go in there and hunt for frogs and bugs and things of that nature.”
Chen began keyboard proficiency classes at age 6, and when he was 7, “I came home, and a violin was waiting for me,” he says. “Maybe it had something to do with the fact that my sisters played piano, and there was one piano in the house, so they figured it might be easier to divvy up the practice time” if someone played fiddle.
Like most youngsters, Chen “much preferred going outside – I wanted to go to the swimming pool or play ball in the field or hang out in the neighborhood with the kids,” he says. “Practicing was not so high up on the totem pole.”
Still, he believes he learned a lot from a “very strict” violin teacher in Taipei, and when the family moved to Los Angeles in 1979, when Chen was 10, he continued his studies, working with violinist Robert Lipsett and taking part in Jascha Heifetz’s master classes. Chen went on to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees
from the Juilliard School, where he was a student of Dorothy DeLay and Masao Kawasaki.
“He’s an excellent violinist,” says violinist Samuel Magad, who shared the concertmaster post with Chen beginning in 1999.
Magad retired from the orchestra in 2007, after a 48-year run, and since then, “I’ve heard him, and he sounds beautiful. It’s really a pleasure to hear him. I know he continues in the tradition of the Chicago Symphony, which is all we try to do.”
Married to violinist Laura Park Chen and father of two teenagers now studying music on the East Coast, Robert Chen has a particular goal for the upcoming tour.
“Whenever you go on tour to a place that’s not home, one’s desire is always to bring something to the public, to express something that touches them in a specific way,” says Chen.
“And it’s something that they will take away from that experience. It’s about giving. The more you give, the more you get in return. That’s how it should be for a musician. So that’s what I’m hoping to get from this trip.”
During two Tokyo concerts, the CSO will perform Verdi’s Requiem Mass, a Muti specialty.
“It’s a work that he’s very fond of – it’s his daily bread, almost,” says Chen.
“It will be a great honor to go to Asia again with maestro Muti. I’m not sure if we will do it again. Given his tenure will finish in 2022, it might be the last time that we go there with this music director.
“There should be some kind of meaning in that.”