Fair Haven | Music | Arts & Culture | New Haven Chamber Orchestra
| Jessie Chen with Maestro Heejung Park. Lucy Gellman Photos. |
Jessie Chen leaned into his violin, listening for an entrance. A flush of woodwinds rose from the stage, drums rolling in underneath. Around him, strings swelled, a fast and rising tide. His violin took its first sharp breath and coasted over the audience, empty but for a few people in the back. As if on cue, every ear in the room perked up.
Maestro Heejung Park raised his arms sharply. He tilted his head to one side. Something was off. Just as it had started, the music fell to a hush, then picked up the same measure for a third time. Chen started in again.
Saturday, Chen will join the New Haven Chamber Orchestra (NHCO) for its all-Beethoven fall concert, scheduled for 2 p.m. at Fair Haven School on Grand Avenue. In addition to Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 61, on which Chen will be the soloist, the orchestra is playing the composer’s Leonore Overture No. 3 Op. 72 and sweeping third symphony “Eroica” (Heroic),which is as epic as the title suggests.
“It feels great to have an opportunity to play with an orchestra,” Chen said at a rehearsal earlier this week, as the group ran through the concerto with him. “That’s something that’s very common around here, I think. But it’s a pretty rare opportunity to be able to perform as a soloist.”
In some ways, the concert takes the orchestra’s pulse as it steadily grows its footprint. Jonathan Yun, a high school clarinetist who first played with the NHCO earlier this year, has returned to join the clarinet section for this and future concerts and rehearsals. As in years past, the event also includes a free book giveaway, with musical selections geared toward learning about the composer. And with “Eroica,” the group will be ending the year on a literally climactic note.
But for Chen, who comes to New Haven after studies at Princeton and The Julliard School, the concerto is also an unexpected gift. A graduate student at the Yale School of Music, he noted that it’s still relatively uncommon for students to get the chance to solo with local and regional orchestras, or play with them at all. When Park suggested the concerto to him earlier this year, he jumped at the opportunity.
“I think it’s the most beautiful violin concerto there is,” he said, laughing as he doubled down on the statement. “It looks very technically simple, but the way he [Beethoven] transforms these scales and harmonies into such an impactful piece is what makes it really beautiful.”
As he took the stage to rehearse it Tuesday night, that beauty made its way across the stage and into the auditorium, flowing right from where Chen stood out into the empty seats. The concerto is deceptively polite: it begins with rolling, incredibly gentle drums and woodwinds, strings that rise so softly them seem afraid of interrupting the other sections. Notes stretch out, declarative and sharp for just a moment before they stretch out again. They rise, and the orchestra puffs out its collective chest and waits for the exhale.
By the time the violin breaks in—the wait is only about three minutes, but it feels much longer—the listener is hooked. The solo instrument becomes the nervous system of the piece, supplying it with a life force that feeds the orchestra around it.
Violin rises and cascades back down, and strings fall to a hush around it. It hits the top of its register, warbling like a sparrow, and the orchestra responds with a sound like something at the bottom of the ocean. It talks back to every section, savoring the thunderous and the whispered instrumentals that chatter around it. Spread over three movements, it covers huge territory, soaring from building, shrill suspense to an undulating call-and-response. Sections go so far as to sounds folksy and even disturbing, like a weird classical-drone music hybrid long before drone music was ever a thing.
While it does not have the chutzpah or “Eroica,” which invokes Napoleon’s dreams of revolution and empire, it seems to have become the core of the show. On stage, Chen has mastered Beethoven's terrain: he is incredibly nimble and equally emotive, turning his bow into pure magic before 45 minutes have passed. Tuesday night, he ran over measures over and over again, patiently playing the composer back into being.
“It paints a picture over almost 45 minutes,” he said. “One vast landscape.”
The New Haven Chamber Orchestra performs on Nov. 23 at Fair Haven School, 164 Grand Ave. This year’s giveaway books include the Ludwig Van Beethoven installment of the Getting to Know the World's Greatest Composers series and Mo Willems’ Listen To My Trumpet! from the Elephant & Piggie series.