VC Artist violinist Stella Chen has released her new album Beethoven & Barber: Violin Concertos on the Platoon Records label. The album features Chen's performances of Ludwig van Beethoven's Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 61, paired with Samuel Barber's Violin Concerto, Op. 14.

Chen performs alongside the orchestra of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, which is led by conductor Jean-Jacques Kantorow. 

The album is dedicated to Adam Abeshouse, an engineer and record producer who collaborated with Chen on her 2023 debut album Stella x Schubert. Abeshouse passed away in October 2024.

While the two concerti featured on the album were composed over one hundred years apart and represent dramatically different musical languages, they are united by several factors, including the simple beauty of their second themes and the deeply subjective, human nature of their interpretive possibilities.

Recording Beethoven's work, which Chen described as "my dream concerto since I was a girl," coincided with another significant turning point in Chen's career. After recording the Beethoven concerto on the 1708 "Huggins" Stradivarius, which Chen has played since 2019, passed the instrument on to the Nippon Foundation, from which it was on loan. Her performance of the Barber concerto is the first with her new partner, the 1720 "General Kyd" Stradivarius, with which she was connected by The Violin Channel founder Geoffrey John Davies.

 

"They say the Beethoven Violin Concerto takes time to love—it isn’t always a young violinist’s first infatuation," wrote Chen in the album's liner notes. "But even at eighteen, it was, for me, the ultimate ideal: a marriage of compositional perfection and devastating beauty. Learning it was both a privilege and a daunting responsibility, for I couldn’t shake the feeling that its quiet profundity belonged to a future version of myself—one I had not yet become.

"Years later, my relationship with both the Beethoven and Barber concertos has deepened in ways I could never have imagined. I now dwell blissfully within them, knowing this connection will continue to evolve throughout my life. This album is a time capsule—a portrait of this moment, of how these works speak to me now, and of the immense love and care that brought them into being."

Hear the full album below:

 

VC Artist Stella Chen won First Prize at the 2019 Queen Elisabeth Competition and was a recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2020. She has appeared as a soloist with the ensembles, including the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, the Israel Philharmonic, and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. An avid chamber musician, she appears regularly with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and has performed at festivals including the Moritzburg Festival, Ravinia, the Seattle Chamber Music Society, the Perlman Music Program, and Music@Menlo. The inaugural recipient of Harvard University's Robert Levin Award, Chen is currently on the faculty of The Juilliard School.