Ray Chen

Taipei-born in 1989 and raised in Australia, Ray Chen entered the Curtis Institute at fifteen to study with Aaron Rosand, and took first prize at the Yehudi Menuhin Competition in 2008 and at the Queen Elisabeth in 2009, having placed third in the Menuhin junior division four years earlier. He signed to Sony Classical in 2010 and to Decca in 2017, and has played Stradivari violins on loan from the Nippon Music Foundation, among them the 1715 "Joachim". Concerto engagements take him through Europe, Asia, Australia and North America; away from them he has built an unusually large online audience for violin playing, and his 2024 album Player 1, drawn from video-game music, found listeners well beyond the concert hall. He first played as a soloist with the Queensland Philharmonic Orchestra at eight and appeared at the opening celebration concert of the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano. His first Sony album, Virtuoso, took an ECHO Klassik prize; he was resident at the Dortmund Konzerthaus from 2012 to 2015 and has played the Nobel Prize concert in Stockholm with the Royal Philharmonic under Christoph Eschenbach.