Ray Chen Captivates a Full House in Long-Awaited Manila Recital

Fifteen years is a long time between visits, but on Wednesday night at the Proscenium Theater, Ray Chen made it worth it. For Ray Chen, whose career has taken him across concert halls around the world, the gap between his last Manila appearance and the latest sold-out violin recital in Manila was not lost on him (or on the audience that packed the house to see him).

Accompanying him on piano was Chelsea Wang, an award-winning chamber musician whose credits include Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, and the Konzerthaus Berlin.

The program opened with Mozart’s Violin Sonata in B-flat Major, K. 454. It feels like a conversational work that puts violin and piano on equal footing. After playing it, Chen shared a detail about its premiere: Mozart hadn’t written the piano part down yet and performed it from memory with a blank sheet of paper on his stand. The Grieg sonata that followed sits in darker territory, with its tonality giving the piece a restless weight. Bach’s movements from Partita No. 3 shifted the mood again, while the two Sarasate pieces that closed the first half leaned into pure showmanship. Playera is slow and aching, drawn from Spanish folk idiom, while Carmen Fantasy is exactly what it sounds like: a technically demanding sprint, built to dazzle.

And dazzled, we were. The Manila crowd responded with nonstop standing ovations, and Chen and Wang gave the audience three encores: “Merry-Go-Round of Life,” “Czardas,” and Debussy’s “Clair de Lune.” Before that last piece, Chen paused to tell the audience they were saving more for next time and confirmed, to the crowd’s delight, that he would be back.

Chen also acknowledged the long gap during the evening. “Some of you might have still been kids the last time I was here,” he said. “Some of you may not have even been born.”

The house was full from the start, the ovations ran long, and Ray Chen left Manila with an open promise.

Ray Chen Violin Recital is presented by Film Concerts PH.

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