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Colburn’s Chen Returns for Powerful Show

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SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

After her studies at the Colburn School of Performing Arts in the 1980s, pianist Wendy Chen went on to win a series of competition prizes in the 1990s and is waving the contrasting flags of Mozart and Rachmaninoff in the concerto wars. So it was as a Distinguished Alumnus that Chen returned to her alma mater Sunday --albeit a relocated alma mater: the Zipper Concert Hall in the school’s new downtown facility.

Chen is technically endowed to do just about anything she wants on a keyboard, although her tendency to clamp down on the damper pedal and the bass-heavy, hollow sound of the Fazioli piano on hand sometimes obscured a lot of detail.

She wasn’t afraid to challenge the PC period-instrument movement with her thoughtful, brilliantly controlled renditions of Busoni’s thickened, Romanticized piano arrangements of three J.S. Bach Chorale/Preludes. She drifted impressionistically through the Chopin Andante spianato, creating lovely coloristic effects in the right hand while blurring the bass, and the succeeding Grande Polonaise had a relaxed, confident power.

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Chen’s ability to throw an attractive silky veil over the piano’s tone served her well in her renditions of four nostalgic sonic paintings from Janacek’s “On an Overgrown Path,” a naive Czech equivalent of MacDowell’s miniatures. She then attacked Rachmaninoff’s Sonata No. 2 with fearless bravado, displaying plenty of temperament, drifting delicacy and a good feeling for architecture, though the details of the thundering passages often vanished in a blurred if undeniably exciting bank of sound. Her limpid encore was a transcription of the Melodie from Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice.”

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