A Romantic Interlude

FOR some winners of the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra's yearly concerto competition, practicing for the contest has been a nervewracking ordeal, and victory has been cause for rejoicing.

Not for Shu-Ching Chen, this year's winner. The Eliot House sophomore says it was almost on a whim that, in the space of two months, she learned Tchaikovsky's long and demanding first piano concerto, which she will play with the HRO at Sanders Theater tonight.

And she took her victory in stride, for winning competitions is nothing new to her.

Since the age of 11, when she took first place in her native Taiwan's national piano competition, the Los Angeles resident has put together an extraordinary string of musical accolades: soloing with the Taipei Municipal Symphony orchestra, playing with the Los Angeles Philharmonic 10 times, and winning a spate of competitions, including the concerto contest at the Manhattan School of Music, where she spent a year before coming to Harvard.

Since she enrolled in music school in third grade, music has been a large part of her life, she says, and at Harvard, where she practices four to five hours a day, her classes are often relegated to the status of extracurriculars.

But she says she doesn't regret the decision to enroll at Harvard, unusual though it is for a budding professional musician.

"I've always wanted to be a wellrounded person. Taking non-music classes, that's why I came here. Also, I wanted to make friends who are not musicians. When you're with musicians, they talk generally about just music," says Chen, who will travel with the HRO on its East Asian tour this summer.

A music concentrator, Chen says she does regret the lack of emphasis on performance in the her department--an age-old gripe among Harvard musicians. Little has changed since the days of Leonard Bernstein '40, when, he has said, one could walk through Paine Hall and not hear a note of music.

A course on rhythm, integrating theory and performance, has been one of the most rewarding classes she's taken, she says. "I wish we had more classes like that. It's very helpful," says Chen, who is now studying with Russell Sherman, a well-known pedagogue who lives and teaches in Lexington.

In a concert that the HRO is billing as "An Evening With Three Romantics," the sweeping Tchaikovsky B-flat minor concerto figures to be the most accessible and romantic offering. Listeners' ears have changed much since the concerto's premiere in Boston more than a century ago, after which the work was hailed as "extremely difficult, strange, wild, ultra-modern," and, "like the first pancake, a flop."

Thirty years have passed since Van Cliburn, that apple pie-fed Texan, conquered Moscow in the first Tchaikovsky competition, which required performance of the concerto. Since then, with the rise in competitions' importance, the work has become one of the most overplayed of all repertoire staples. The passion and fervor of the work, which seemed so wild and new in 1875, can strike the jaded modern ear as overworn and even vacuous.

Chen says she harbors no great desire to introduce into her performance novelty for novelty's sake. "I wouldn't do anything drastically new with it, because I'm not a well-known artist and it wouldn't be acceptable," she says.

But neither does Chen, who says she avoids listening to recordings of pieces she is learning, want to conform to any particular standard.

"I don't want to imitate anyone else, just play the best I can. I've always wanted to learn the piece, and I still love it, no matter how much it's played."

Besides the Tchaikovsky concerto, tonight's concert will include Wagner's Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, music with wondrous sonorities and rich modulations, and the "Inextinguishable" symphony of the Danish composer Carl Nielsen (1865-1931), which promises to be the most "modern"--not to say "unromantic"--work of the evening.