Ray Chen

Taiwanese-Australian violinist Ray Chen was born in Taipei in 1989 and began studying the violin at the age of four using the Suzuki method. At just eight years of age, he made his concerto debut with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, following his family’s move to Australia; in 1998, he also performed at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Nagano. He studied with Peter Zhang in Sydney and, starting in 2004, with Aaron Rosand at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. He has taken part in masterclasses with Midori, Cho-Liang Lin, Maxim Vengerov, and Antje Weithaas. Chen won the Yehudi Menuhin International Competition for Young Violinists in 2008; in 2009, he was first prize winner of the Young Concert Artists Auditions in New York and received both First Prize and the Audience Award at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels. Since then, he has performed worldwide with leading orchestras, including the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Filarmonica della Scala and the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, the San Francisco and Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestras, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and the Munich Philharmonic. He has collaborated with conductors such as Riccardo Chailly, Daniele Gatti, Manfred Honeck, Vladimir Jurowski, Sakari Oramo, and Kirill Petrenko. Chen has played before an audience of 800,000 at France’s Bastille Day celebrations, appeared at a concert for Nobel Prize laureates in Stockholm, and performed at the BBC Proms. He is also actively engaged in music education, including as co-founder of the start-up Tonic, which has developed an app for instrumental practice. He maintains a strong presence on social media, using it to engage directly with his audience. His debut album Virtuoso received the Echo Klassik Award in 2011. He has since released nine albums; most recently, in autumn 2024, Player 1 was issued, featuring, among other works, Korngold’s Violin Concerto. Ray Chen performs on a Stradivarius built in 1727.

One previous appearance at Lucerne Festival: on 29 August 2013, when he gave a Debut concert featuring works by Bach, Stravinsky, and Prokofiev, with Julien Quentin at the keyboard.