PerformanceE

Marshalltown Community Concert Association
Friday, March 16, 2012 - 7:00 p.m.

Anita Chen

Called by the press as one of the rarest occurrences in orchestral music, multi-talented rising star Anita Chen has received accolades by critics and audiences for being equally talented as a soloist on two instruments. She is quickly becoming an internationally recognized double-treat on both the violin and piano. Launching her career as a professional soloist at age 11, Anita performed in eight concerts on both violin and piano with the St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble at the Isaac Stern Auditorium at Carnegie Hall in New York in 2002.

In 2006, Anita made her recording debut on the Bel Air Music BAM label with Russia’s Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra under Dmitry Yablonsky, featuring E.Grieg’s Piano Concerto, and J. Conus’s Violin Concerto and “Formosa Capriccio” by Albert Markov. Critic Julian Haylock of The Strad wrote about her violin performance: “...Her tone is both alluring and sensuous...” and about the piano “... Her inspirational account of the Grieg Concerto exudes confidence in all departments...” Robert Matthew-Walker of the Record-Review (March 2007) said about her Grieg performance, “it is a most enjoyable, clean and fresh performance” and “her playing of Conus’s Concerto is also excellent.”

In addition to her performances in the United States, Miss Chen participated in music festivals in France and Spain, and in 2007 she toured across Italy and appeared in a solo recital in Mexico as part of the Parnassos concert series. She opened the 2008/2009 season as orchestral soloist with the Bridgeport Symphony under Gustav Meier performing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 followed by Paganini’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in an arrangement by Fritz Kreisler, the Austrian-born American violinist and composer.

In February 2009, Anita returned to Carnegie Hall and made her recital debut at Zankel Hall in a program featuring Cimarosa, Mozart, Schubert, Liszt, Prokofiev and Markov, performing the first half of the concert on piano and the second half on violin. The sell-out audience responded with a shouting and stamping ovation (and a pile of floral tributes). They were rewarded with a piano and violin encore of which New York’s music critic Edith Eisler wrote “The concert aroused admiration, but also two disturbing questions: Is being a prodigy on one instrument no longer enough to attract attention? And will future prodigies have to equal this double whammy?” Other engagements took Miss Chen to Europe again, where she was the featured recitalist in Germany, Italy and England.

Born in America in July 1991 to Taiwanese parents who are both singers, prodigiously gifted Anita Chen began to study the piano at age 4 and within a year, she added the violin. At age 7, she was accepted into the pre-college division at Juilliard School. Anita has won numerous piano and violin competitions and, most recently, competing on the violin, was the winner of the GBS’s 2007 Carlson-Horn Competition. She is now studying piano with Oxana Yablonskaya in Italy and in the U.S. and violin with Albert Markov.

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