In 2020, Yung-Yi Chen turned 20, and then the pandemic hit.
The young pianist realized this could be a pause in his career—if he let it. Chen searched for ways to challenge himself and happened upon the sixth NTD International Piano Competition.
“If one day my goal is performing, then this is the path I need to take. Although it’s very hard, although sometimes it is frustrating, I feel this is the path I have to take,” said Chen at the final round of the competition at the Kaufman Music Center in New York City on Nov. 1, 2022. “The reason I joined this competition is to prepare myself to deal with music, and deal with performance pressures in the future.”
“To be honest, this is my first three-round competition,” said Chen, who has performed on stages and at music festivals in Asia, Europe, and the United States. “The whole experience was so different, from the preparation and effort to the coordination and programming.”
For Chen, who is walking his own path, the semi-finals round provided some inspiration. Pianists were tasked to perform “The Sacred Journey,” a specially commissioned work arranged from a composition by D.F., artistic director of the world-renowned Shen Yun Performing Arts.
“It goes from this magnificent big music to nearly music box-like elements,” Chen said. “That music box part moved me the most. If this is travel, at this point the music has gone through some really big points—good things, bad things. The music box part I feel like is after we have gone through some terrible things on the journey, or even some frustrations, but it reminds the character, the protagonist, or even me, the original thoughts we have, the purpose of why we are on this journey. And this gives us more energy to face the future challenge and go on.”
“It’s a very challenging piece,” he said. “It has all kinds of difficult techniques, you have notes running all the way around, glissandos, or very fast passages. The only way to make those fast passages work, and [be] stable, is to practice them slowly with a metronome, and metronome practice takes time. And considering the short amount of time we have to prepare this piece, this is something that pushed me to my limits.”
“But at the same time, this also helped me,” he said. Pressure makes one practice efficiently, Chen said.
For the final round, Chen put together a program that began with Scarlatti, to warm himself up and get in the right mindset with a Baroque piece, followed directly by one of Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes. Next was a Chopin Nocturne, before finishing with Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy.
“I have much to learn,” said Chen, who drew inspiration from his favorite composer, Brahms, even though he wasn’t part of the program. “Unlike many of the composers of his time, he wanted to be traditional, similar to this competition, to lift up and not fail to recognize the glory of great old literature. At the same time, Brahms did not fail to add a lot of the new, Romantic elements in his music.”
“I am fascinated by the color and mood of music, and 19th-century Romanticism just hits my heart,” he said. “Art is about exploring the beauty of what you are doing, improving, and exploring the possibilities, the infinite possibilities in art.”
