Lunar New Year Celebration with Artist Rueibin Chen - Interview by CNN

It was so great meeting the very stylish reporter Ms Joyce who is a classical pianist and jazz musician by training. See her report on CNN (1) :

Lunar New Year Celebration with Artist 

Rueibin Chen

Posted by CNN 

February 17, 2015 | Beverly Hills, California

I had the unique opportunity to interview world renown artist and pianist Rueibin Chen best-selling classical recording artist.

Mr. Chen was performing shortly after I interviewed him with L’Ensemble du Ciel playing Chinese instruments. He was the featured performer for the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts Lunar New Year Celebration for The Year of the Sheep.

I am a trained classical pianist and jazz saxophone player myself and I have a great respect for people that play and for those that play as well as he does.

He grew up as child prodigy and studied in Vienna. When he was making his debut with the Taipei Symphony Orchestra at age ten, I was learning to play the piano and had surpassed playing chopsticks. I started playing when I was 9 years old, he started playing when he was 3 years old, which explains why he is being interviewed.

Today he performed in a unique program where East meets West utilizing Chinese instruments. Despite the fact that I am Chinese, I am unfamiliar with the instruments of an erhu, pipa and gaohu but am familiar with a Chinese bamboo flute.

He is a music lover. His passion for music is evident when you speak with him and even more so when you hear him perform. He told me, he loves to play, to perform the music for an audience. To him “music is the best language for me, to communicate with people.”

Chen’s most prized prize…. in Israel, Tel Aviv, Israel from the former president of Israel, who had just himself received the Nobel Prize. “My great memory is because I received the prize from this great person.”

He would like the audience to remember him as an artist, not as a pianist. “I come to stage to make art.” R