Pianist Tony Yan Tong Chen Photo: Supplied
Tony Chen is Auckland-born and his teachers here include Jian Liu, Bryan Sayer and Rae de Lisle.
Currently (2020) he’s a student at the Eastman School of Music in New York. He’s supported by Professor Jack Richards and has performed at festivals in Canada, Switzerland and Spain.
Prokofiev's Seventh Sonata is the second of three sonatas written during the years of the Second World War. The three of them contain some of Prokofiev’s most dissonant and brutal piano music – presumably a response to the war to a certain extent, but also they follow the arrest and execution by the NKVD of Prokofiev’s friend and colleague the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold and the murder of Meyerhold’s wife Zinaida Raikh.
Dark days and dark music. But the power of this music is overwhelming, especially in the Precipitato third movement.
Recorded in the Lewis Eady Showroom, Auckland, 3 October 2020
Engineer/Producer: Tim Dodd
