Stella Chen Comes to Davies Symphony Hall

Stella Chen on the cover of her debut album

Violinist Stella Chen made her San Francisco debut in March of last year, when she performed a duo recital with pianist Henry Kramer for Chamber Music San Francisco. I had been prepared for this occasion, having just written about her debut album Stella x Schubert; and I came away from her recital as satisfied as I had been with her recording. Last night Chen returned to San Francisco (which happens to be her home town), accompanied this time by pianist George Li. The two of them presented the final program in this season’s Shenson Spotlight Series in Davies Symphony Hall.

Interestingly enough, Chen chose to begin her program with the opening track of her album, Franz Schubert’s D. 895 rondo in B minor. As one can tell by the catalog number, this is a comparatively late composition. The traditional rondo form involves a repeated theme with alternative episodes separating the repetitions. Schubert basically works with a few themes going through different patterns of repetition, taking the attentive listener on a moderately (at least) wild ride, due in part to turn-on-a-dime key changes when they are least expected. Chen’s recording of this music which deserves more attention has become one of my favorites, so I was more than delighted to encounter it at the beginning of last night’s recital. Her account with Li was as stimulating as my “first contact” experience.

The overall program was framed to begin with Schubert and conclude with Ludwig van Beethoven. The final selection was his Opus 47 sonata in A major, best known by the name “Kreutzer.” Beethoven did not write many violin sonatas, and some would say that the genre did not appeal to him very much. What I found interesting about the music was that the middle movement of variations on a theme (a genre that did interest in Beethoven) came across as rather weak in comparison to the bold strokes in the outer two movements. Neither Chen nor Li was shy about giving all of those bold strokes their necessary due, and the energy they brought to the concluding Presto made for a stimulating conclusion.

Between these two classical offerings, the duo performed Eleanor Alberga’s “No-Man’s-Land Lullaby.” I first encountered this music in November of 2020, when violinist Phyllis Kamrin and pianist Eric Zivian played it at a Left Coast Chamber Ensemble performance. The first part of the title evokes the carnage of World War I, which casts a dark shadow on references to the song that Johannes Brahms entitled simply “Wiegenlied” in his Opus 49 collection. My first listening experience left me thinking of William Shakespeare’s phrase in Macbeth about sleep being murdered, and those thoughts haunted me again in last night’s performance.

Since Chen decided to begin her program with the opening track on Stella x Schubert, I was not surprised to find that her encore was the album’s final track. This was “Ständchen,” the fourth song in Schubert’s D. 957 Schwanengesang (swan song) collection. This is one of those tunes that I have known from early piano lessons. However, it was only after I began to pay attention to the texts that Schubert was setting that my interest was really piqued. I can now appreciate why Chen selected it to conclude her album; and, by the same count, it made for a perfect farewell to her audience.