This article was updated in December 2024.
These are hard days for the world, and the arts are not an exception. With the present [2020, the year COVID-19 closed down the world] riddled with uncertainties, it might be a struggle for many of us to see very far into the future, and it might be even harder to see any light shining beyond the hurdles: thankfully the younger generation has risen to the challenge, now more than ever, to teach us that there is so much to look forward to. The voices of tomorrow are every day proving more and more to be smart, compassionate and so very talented.
Among those who are already making waves in their own right, deftly adapting to the ever-changing shapes of today's performing arts field, is 13-year-old violinist Chloe Chua.
Despite her young age, Chloe has already an impressive curriculum vitae of competition victories and professional performances behind her and recently performed Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 2 with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra and Hans Graf. The performance was streamed online for audiences worldwide, but the musicians are playing together, appropriately masked or distanced, on the stage of the Esplanade Concert Hall in Singapore.
When we interviewed Graf earlier this month [November 2020], he said of Chloe, among other things: “I strongly refuse to call her a Wunderkind. She's a normal, nice, modest girl, a little bit shy, but when she speaks with her violin, she's a grown-up. She's an adult musical soul. And she's the quickest pro I have worked with in a while.’”
We were curious to find out more about such a young and talented artist, so we went on a little video journey through some of her best performances to date.
Chloe started studying violin at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA) in Singapore when she was only four years old, after a brief stint playing the piano when she was even younger. Encouraged by her parents' love for music – her mother is a piano teacher – she soon became very passionate about the instrument. Her hard work and skills led her to participate in several international competitions, including the Andrea Postacchini International Violin Competition in Italy, which she won in 2017, and the Menuhin Competition, in Switzerland, which she won in 2018, sharing joint first prize in the Junior Division with Australian Christian Li.
Here is her performance of Vivaldi's Winter during the closing gala at the Menuhin Competition in Geneva.
Another beautiful performance comes in the shape of an outdoor concert with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, as her December one won't be Chloe's first experience sharing the stage with this world-class ensemble. Here she is playing a Fantasy on Bizet's Carmen during the orchestra's Mother's Day concert last year.
When people talk about the future of classical music, it always feels like such an abstract concept, one that is peppered with apocalyptic tales of empty concert halls and young audiences no longer interested in the good ol' repertoire. The truth is, however, that you don't have to look very hard to discover many young musicians interested in classical music – although maybe to find them one has to hang around in slightly different spaces from those you'd expect.