Violinist Stella Chen joins ASMF to open the new season with Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D major, following her widely acclaimed recent recording of the work with the orchestra. The programme includes Caroline Shaw’s Punctum, which draws on Bach’s St Matthew Passion, and closes with Mozart’s Symphony No.39.
- You’ve described Beethoven’s Violin Concerto as “the ultimate ideal” since you were eighteen. What drew you to it so strongly, and how has your relationship with the piece changed over time?
It’s funny, I remember so clearly hearing this piece for the first time and being shaken to the core. I couldn’t imagine something more perfect, but I also immediately decided, as a teenager, that I wasn’t mature enough to play it. I felt Beethoven was meditating on questions and reaching emotional states I simply hadn’t experienced yet. So when my teacher at the time, Itzhak Perlman, assigned it to me, I panicked and said, “But I’m not emotionally or intellectually ready for this!” And he said, “If you’re not going to start now, how are you going to play it when you’re 70?”
That exchange has stayed with me and, in some ways, informed my relationship with music in general. With the Beethoven concerto especially, I try to approach the music with enormous care, love, and respect, but also with enough audacity to make choices and truly inhabit it. I know I’ll still be discovering completely different things in it when I’m 70.
- You recently recorded the Beethoven concerto with ASMF. How did that recording process shape the way you approach the work in live performance?
Recording the Beethoven with ASMF and my late producer, Adam Abeshouse, was a dream. I had wanted to play with the Academy since I was a little girl, and Adam was someone I loved deeply and had worked with before; he also had a long history with ASMF. To have all of those threads come together for a piece that means so much to me felt incredibly special, thanks to Adam, ASMF, and my unbelievable team at Platoon.
Adam passed away shortly afterwards, and I later went through the recording in great detail with Silas Brown. That became a very different kind of learning experience, deeply emotional and incredibly revealing. Listening so closely forces you to confront every choice: what feels honest, what feels affected, where the music needs more freedom, where it needs less. And those answers can be different every time you hear it.
I’ve become extremely emotional every time I’ve revisited this concerto since the recording. Performing it live with ASMF will carry all of that and more, it’ll be our first reunion since Adam’s passing. In working on it, I let all of the emotions wash over me: the gratitude, the joy, the loss, the pain. What is also so liberating about live performance is that the storytelling choices depend entirely on the atmosphere, the musicians, and the audience in that hall on that day. And the most beautiful thing about live performance is that you then let all of that go and make the piece anew together in the moment.
- The concerto moves between grandeur and great intimacy. How do you balance those two qualities as a soloist?
That’s one of the great joys of playing this piece with an ensemble like ASMF. The concerto somehow contains both enormous symphonic grandeur and the intimacy of chamber music, sometimes within the space of a few measures.
With players as sensitive and responsive as those in ASMF, a harmony change can wash over you almost without your realizing it and change your world; before you’ve finished absorbing it, the music expands into something enormous. I love being one part of the conversation, alive and moving and transforming alongside the other musicians. Beethoven asks for an extraordinary range without ever allowing the architecture to lose its inevitability. The constant listening and reacting his music demands is one of the reasons I love performing the concerto.
- This programme places Beethoven alongside Caroline Shaw and Mozart. How do you see the concerto fitting into that wider musical conversation?
What I love about this programme is that all three composers are, in completely different ways, both deeply aware of tradition and unafraid to transform it. Mozart takes the language he inherits and stretches it with extraordinary imagination; Beethoven takes that Classical world and radically expands its emotional and architectural possibilities. And then Caroline Shaw, centuries later, engages with musical memory itself, reaching back toward Bach, but through an unmistakably contemporary voice. For me, all three composers are searching for something new without ever sacrificing beauty or humanity. That feels very connected to the Beethoven concerto: it is revolutionary music, but its radicalism never calls attention to itself. Everything is ultimately in service of expression.
- This concert opens ASMF’s 2026/27 London season at St Martin-in-the-Fields. Does performing such an important work in that setting give the occasion particular significance for you?
Very much so. I first played chamber music with musicians from ASMF at the Menuhin Competition when I was 13, and I remember being completely captivated by the way they listened and communicated. I’ve dreamed of playing with the Academy ever since. Then, years later, we finally came together to record the Beethoven with my beloved Adam Abeshouse. The generosity and openness I felt from the musicians during that process made an already meaningful relationship even more personal.
So returning now to perform this piece together live — and to open ASMF’s London season at St Martin-in-the-Fields, in the orchestra’s home — just wow. Beethoven’s concerto is still the piece I think of as the closest thing to perfection, and to share it with musicians I have admired since childhood is a tremendous privilege. I know it will be an emotional evening for me, but above all, I’m excited to honor Adam, and enormously excited to make music together again.
For ticket and info: https://www.asmf.org/whats-on/asmf-stella-chen/