Taiwanese-born Australian violinist Ray Chen has moved from Sony to Decca and released The Golden Age as his debut. As the album suggests, the program's subject is the classic age of violin playing in the early 1900s, when the veteran Fritz Kreisler and the young Jascha Heifetz ruled the scene. Yet the mood here is hardly nostalgic. First of all, Chen is muscular and fresh in the centerpiece, the Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 26, of Max Bruch. Sample the breadth of the opening movement's beginning. Chen achieves a hair-trigger tension in many of the big passages, and he has a sense of command in the various Kreisler and Heifetz miniatures along the way -- maybe too much of a sense of command in Schön Rosmarin, which doesn't have the lilt it should. But the second major draw is that there is new music here. Chen plays not only the Bruch concerto and the miniatures with violin and the piano of Julien Quentin, he performs chamber arrangements with his string quartet Made in Berlin. The arrangements are by that group's cellist, Stephan Koncz, and they're quite striking: the most elaborate, and the most distant from anything Kreisler or Heifetz did, is the final Waltzing Matilda. Nobody has ever given a traditional tune this kind of treatment before, and it's both surprising and convincing. Decca's sound is a negative, lurching between the different media and making Chen's top sound a bit more shrill than it probably is in edgy passages. Nevertheless, this album gives strong indications that Chen has original ideas and can break out of the pack of younger violinists.
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