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Foundation for Chinese Performing Arts
Summer FREE Concert @ NEC 2026 夏日系列音樂會 at New England Conservatory, Boston, Massachusetts Aug 6 to 22, 2026 All concerts Admission Free, suggested donation $10 at door Age 6 and under not admitted |
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Han Chen
陳涵,
pianist
&
composer
A
fearless performer with seemingly limitless imagination and possessed with
uncanny energy, GRAMMY-nominated pianist Han Chen plays scores old and new
with rare rigor and insight. Gramophone has praised Mr. Chen as
"impressively commanding and authoritative" and further cited by The New
York Times for his "graceful touch," "rhythmic precision" and "hypnotic
charm."
Mr. Chen's musical vision is manifest in his four solo albums focusing on
Franz Liszt, Anton Rubinstein, Thomas Adès, György Ligeti, and a concerto
album featuring Florence Price's Piano Concerto in One Movement in D minor
(conductor John Jeter, Malmö Opera Orchestra), which was nominated for a
GRAMMY Award in the Best Classical Instrumental Solo category.
Alex Ross, classical music critic of The New Yorker, who selected Mr. Chen's
disc of the Ligeti Études and Capriccios as a "Notable Classical Recording
of 2023," characterized him as follows:
The Taiwanese pianist Han Chen, a noted interpreter of the Ligeti Études and other modernist repertory, has made a blistering album of the [Liszt] opera transcriptions.
— The New Yorker, September 4, 2023
Reviewing the Ligeti recording in the August 2023 issue of Gramophone, Jed Distler wrote:
[He is] one of the few pianists who handles both gnarly contemporary scores and over-the-top Romantic showpieces with equal authority and style. … [He] surmounts the sophisticated rhythmic challenges of Ligeti's Études to a T, while infusing them with plenty of tonal allure and personality. … Chen aims for clarity and balance over sheer speed, yielding steadier results and more cogent interplay between the hands.
— Gramophone, August 2023
During the
2025/2026 season, Mr. Chen gave the New York Premiere of Tania León's In the
Field, scored for soprano, string quartet, and piano this past fall at the
William Schuman Award Concert at Columbia University's Miller Theatre
honoring Ms. León. He appeared as soloist with the Lansing Symphony
Orchestra earlier this year, to play American composer Jared Miller's
Shattered Night for Piano and Orchestra under the baton of Music Director
and conductor Timothy Muffitt in East Lansing, Michigan. And, joining the
New York Philharmonic String Quartet in April, he participated in the
performance of the Brahms Piano Quintet in F Minor, Op. 34 at Music Academy
of the West. The Quartet is comprised of Music Academy alumna and teaching
artist violist Cynthia Phelps, alumnus violinist Frank Huang, violinist
Qianqian Li, and cellist Carter Brey.
EnsembleNewSRQ (enSRQ) celebrated the 50th anniversary of Steve Reich's
Music for 18 Musicians with a live performance later this past April at the
Sarasota Opera House. Mr. Chen was honored to be included in this concert,
which marked both Mr. Reich's 90th birthday and enSRQ's 10th anniversary.
When Mr. Chen was presented at New York's National Sawdust in a program
entitled "Infinite Staircase," a traversal of the 18 Ligeti Etudes and 18
commissioned companion pieces, George Grella came to the concert and titled
his review: "Han Chen's remarkable playing equal to the genius of Ligeti's
Etudes" and went on to exclaim:
He was astonishing, with some of the finest pianism one has ever witnessed. Beyond sheer dexterity, this was tremendously musical playing, with every phrase clear and pointed in a certain direction, fluid control of dynamics and form, a combination of articulation and force that was hard to believe. One had the feeling that Chen was deep inside the work, opening up every detail of Ligeti's musical personality.
— New York Classical Review, September 25, 2023
Reviewing this event in I Care If You Listen, Lana Norris summarized it as a
…marathon of canonical music and new works that displayed exquisite programming, stupendous technique, and forward-thinking expansion of classical music's best traditions.
— I Care If You Listen, September 28, 2023
Mr. Chen is equally a powerful performer of the classic piano repertoire. Reviewing Mr. Chen performing Beethoven's Sonata No. 29, Op. 106 “Hammerklavier,” Lee Eiseman of The Boston Musical Intelligencer had this to say:
Oxygenated by powerful intellectual bellows and endowed with muscular forearms, Chen didn't just hammer Beethoven's formidably relentless and ever-modern challenge to pianists and listeners; with fire and tempering plunges he alternately annealed, welded, sintered, and sensitively stretched the well-wrought iron into impressive curls and shapely forms. His carefully plotted interpretations conveyed nuance and compelling gesture through very well-graduated colorations and dynamics from white hot to warmly glowing. No two repeated chords sounded the same. Chen's Beethoven seemed to anticipate Berg and Ligeti on this night.
— The Boston Musical Intelligencer, August 19, 2023
Mr. Chen has
appeared as soloist with the Calgary Philharmonic, Fort Worth Symphony,
Lansing Symphony, Lexington Philharmonic, Hong Kong Philharmonic, National
Taiwan Symphony, and Xiamen Philharmonic, among others. In December 2022 he
made his Lincoln Center debut with Riverside Symphony at Alice Tully Hall
performing Mozart's early masterwork, the Piano Concerto No. 9 Jeunehomme.
Mr. Chen has performed as solo recitalist internationally. In demand as a
chamber musician, he has performed with the New York Philharmonic String
Quartet while regularly collaborating with Ensemble Échappé. In 2021, Chen
launched Migration Music, an online series of performances and interviews
with immigrant composers.
Gold Medalist at the 2013 China International Piano Competition and a
prizewinner at the 2018 Honens International Piano Competition, Mr. Chen
studied with Yoheved Kaplinsky, Wha Kyung Byun, and Ursula Oppens at The
Juilliard School, New England Conservatory, and CUNY Graduate Center. He is
represented by Black Tea Music. Mr. Chen is a Steinway Artist.
Fern Flower (Tsvetok Paporotnika)
A new solo piano piece for Han Chen, composed by Nina C. Young
(~10-14 minutes in duration)
In Slavic folklore, the fern flower blooms only once each year, on the eve
of Ivan Kupala, the
midsummer festival later entwined with the feast of St. John the Baptist.
Though ferns bear no
flowers, legends describe a luminous blossom hidden deep within forests,
visible only for a
fleeting instant to those willing to wander through darkness in search of
it. Said to reveal
hidden knowledge or unimaginable fortune, the flower occupies a space
between botany and
myth, scientific impossibility and collective belief.
Written for pianist Han Chen, this work draws inspiration from the imagined
ritual world
surrounding the fern flower and the ecstatic atmosphere of midsummer night
rites: fire and
water ceremonies, whispered chants, invented folk memory, and nocturnal
wanderings
beneath the lingering light of the summer solstice. Delicate, spore-like
musical fragments
gradually accumulate into increasingly cyclical and incantatory forms,
evoking hallucinatory
ritual states, imagined folk memory, and distant liturgical echoes.
At the center of the work lies the brief appearance of the impossible flower
itself: crystalline,
radiant, and ephemeral. The vision vanishes almost immediately, though
traces of its brilliance
continue to resonate long afterward, suspended in the piano’s highest
registers like the
lingering glow of solstice light after sunset.
Thank you for your
generous contribution to
Foundation for Chinese Performing Arts
 |
 中華表演藝術基金會Foundation for Chinese Performing Arts Lincoln, Massachusetts |