Yao Chen’s music in the Media:

Synchronicity共此时, for viola orchestra

特别为本场音乐会委约创作并进行世界首演的作品来自中央音乐学院作曲系副教授姚晨创作的《共此时》。姚晨此前在中美两国的顶尖音乐学府求学，他的作品中不拘于固定的音乐语汇，却格外重视瞬时性的细致表达以及各种结构之间若即若离的关系（这也许是姚晨更倾向室内乐创作的原因之一）。现场，音乐的表达如“意识流”般，明晰的乐思语义让位于乐音彼时彼刻的自我呈现。无论是对作曲家的创作、乐手的演奏还是观众的聆听，都是一次难得的突破性体验。

                                                                         – 洪丁，2019.01《音乐爱好者》  

Air, for violin solo

Air, which made its world debut at the 2015 City of London Festival, takes equal inspiration from the church-tone qualities of J.S. Bach’s violin sonatas and the romantic lines of Eugene Ysaye’s solo sonatas.  “Its character is song-like and a good fit for my style – warm, tender and otherworldly. It is a piece infused with poignant longing.”-Siow Lee Chin

                                                                                                           – The Straits Times   

                                                                                                                   

Two Poems, for orchestra

Brilliant orchestral color also marked Yao’s Two Poems for chamber orchestra. The orchestra captured the haunting atmosphere of the first movement, Sough. Hotoda’s gestural language produced a beautifully contoured performance of the second movement, Glowing Autumn, which bears Ravel’s timbral stamp…

                                                                                                                       -Columbus Dispatch  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           Emanations of Tara, for violin, cello, clarinet, piano and pipa

…par­tic­u­larly expres­sive and direct… There’s an incred­i­ble sense of spa­cious­ness and open­ness in his music: it was about con­vey­ing an inten­sity of the emo­tion…

-Civitas Ensemble

In Emanations of Tara, a substantial, rhapsodic work inspired by the composer’s visit to Tibet, Yao Chen gives prominence to the pipa and prayer bowl. The results are subtle and rewardingly unfamiliar.

                           -The Guardian,Fiona Maddocks

Finally, there is the sheer beauty of Yao Chen’s Emanations of Tara, an extended piece constructed of “Beginning,” “Ending” and five Taras of five colors in between (“Green Tara”; “Golden Tara”; “Blue Tara”; “Red Tara”; “White Tara”). Clarinet doubles bass clarinet here, with the pipa also being very much a part of the group. Inspired by a visit to Tibet, and by Tara, the female bodhisattva of compassion and virtue, the piece is brilliantly and evocatively scored, and full of surprises. Unison arrivals seem to open a veil before we go again into a world that seems very much one of dream or archetype. “Red Tara” is extremely animated: It is marked extremely undertoned but with burning sensation inside. Perhaps there is an analogy here with the red of Mars, the God of War? The “White Tara” movement is a huge contrast, a starry surface seeking to extricate the listener from the flow of time; it leads naturally into the quiet of “Ending.”

-Fanfare Magazine ,Colin Clarke

The album ends with the seven-movement “Emanations of Tara” by Yao Chen, featuring once again the virtuoso Yihan Chen on the pipa. The scoring is masterful and rather neo-Impressionistic in a classic Chinese way with its glowing luminescence, its mysterious depths and breadths.

-Gapplegate Clssical-Modern Music Review, Grego Applegate Edwards

Yearning, for zheng and double bass

…intensely driven…In Chen Yao’s Yearning, the powerful storms that erupted from Deng’s delicate-looking guzheng more than equaled the expressive depth of Armstrong’s double bass.

-Chicago Classical Review

O…What an Awakening, for soprano, violin, cello, flute, clarinet, and piano

Yao Chen’s O… What an Awakening turned out to be a study of the nature of performance. It was as much an exploration of the relationships among conductor, vocalist, and ensemble as one of the logic, grammar, and rhetoric behind the score itself.  Chen seemed [interested] in the interplay of sound and silence. The audience was led into that interplay by the composer having the conductor, soloist, and ensemble each lapse into similar periods of “going through the motions.” This created a sense of music being present without being heard, rather in the manner of a Zen koan.

-San Francisco’s Examiner.com

O… What an Awakening had a strong theatrical element. Musically, it amounted to an effort to reconceive everyday sounds through instrumental and vocal resources. However, the visual impressions of the discipline through which those resources captured material that was originally spontaneous were clearly part of the audience experience. One was thus drawn into a world that was neither mundane nor crafted according to some elaborate plan, a world in which the audience could experience the “making process” with greater intimacy. That intimacy was then challenged by a silence that intrudes upon the sounds themselves but not on the physical motions of the performers…

–Stephen Smoliar SF Classical Music Examiner September 28, 201