Reviews
[1]
Chen takes command at Jordan Hall
Ellen Pfeifer, Boston Globe, March 21, 2001
“The pianist’s Jordan Hall program was ample evidence that Chen is fully
restored as a virtuoso. Out of the refiner’s fire has come a deeply probing,
imaginative player with an enormous palette of tone colors, pedal gradations,
and range of articulation. Whereas one remembers him as a pianist with an excess of yang (‘masculine force’), he has now achieved a
balance of yin. Where he used to be a pianist with relentlessly steely fingers, he can now use those fingers equally deftly to mold a
meltingly lyrical passage.”
Each note precious
Süddeutscher Zeitung, September 16, 2000
“The last human voices fade in the dammed up floor at Gut Ried in Ammerland, and Hung-Kuan Chen invades everything-yet without
the slightest intention, to take anything. It is his personality that casts a spell over the listeners with its inimitable interpretation. His
body and the instrument unite into a great expressive gesture, and each ever so soft and sensitive note becomes the coronation of this
expression.”
[2]
Newtonians play for neighbors
Susan Larson, Boston Globe, November 3, 1999
“[Hung-Kuan] Chen returned to play Chopin’s Nocturne No. 2 in E-flat, allowing the colloquy between soprano and alto voices in his
right hand to float free above the left-hand figurations. His performance of Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 in G Minor, with its mercurial mood
swings and nasty right-hand octaves and tempestuous coda, was a triumph of musical fantasy and fluent technique.”