Stella Chen & Henry Kramer - Stella x Schubert (2023)

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Stella Chen & Henry Kramer - Stella x Schubert (2023)

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On Friday, March 10, 2023, American violinist Stella Chen releases her debut album, Stella x Schubert, with pianist Henry Kramer on the Apple-owned Platoon platform. Performing on the 1700 ex-Petri Stradivarius violin, Chen garnered worldwide attention with her first-prize win at the 2019 Queen Elizabeth International Violin Competition, followed by the 2020 Avery Fisher Career Grant and 2020 Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award.

Chen eloquently shares her personal feelings about Schubert's music in the booklet notes, "My love for Schubert blossomed unexpectedly during a performance analysis class with Robert Levin, a brilliant musician I knew as the phenom who completed Mozart's Requiem for his undergraduate thesis. Known as he is for his encyclopedic knowledge of Mozart, Levin surprised me when he revealed that his favorite piece was Schubert's G Major Quartet, D. 887. He spoke about the music in a way that brought tears to my eyes, despite having never heard the piece myself. Thus began my deep and unwavering love affair with Schubert."

She continues, "For me, no composer conceives of more beautiful melodies than Schubert's, in large part due to his extraordinary ability to translate vulnerability into music. Exposed, devastatingly fragile, almost otherworldly, his music teeters precariously on the brink of life and death. Rightfully wide-eyed but inevitably futile attempts to reproduce or quantify the magic of Schubert have preoccupied performers and scholars for the last two centuries. Having approached his music from both of those perspectives myself, I can only say: Schubert transports us to another world.

"Despite the universal love for his lieder and chamber music, Schubert's duo repertoire for violin and piano has historically been severely underappreciated. Schubert's other chamber and vocal music dwarf the duos in scholarly writing, and popular opinion until the last few decades judged these works as simply inferior, a heartbreaking misconception."

American violinist Stella Chen garnered worldwide attention with her first-prize win at the 2019 Queen Elizabeth International Violin Competition, followed by the 2020 Avery Fisher Career Grant and 2020 Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award.