On Friday 10 July, pianist Chudan Deng and violinist Hui Stan Jin led and presented From Pixels to Legends: A Journey Through Game Music and Fantasy Worlds, an unforgettable concert at St Gabriel’s Church on Warwick Square in Pimlico. They were joined by musicians Siyi Chen, Cecilia Cui, Tianyi Joshua He and Jiaxin Hu, and had taken me to an amazing world of fantasy
Chudan and Stan were not only performers throughout the evening but also served as the concert’s artistic directors, bringing together a programme that explored the growing artistic value of video game music in a chamber setting.
Here’s what struck me most: Chudan and Stan never tried to replicate the cinematic scale of these video game soundtracks – instead, they reimagined them for piano and strings, trusting and presenting the music itself rather than the spectacle of the original orchestration. It was a bold but successful decision, everything got stripped back to the piano and strings. Many of these scores are closely associated with sweeping orchestral colours and immersive sound worlds, yet in this more intimate setting their musical substance came into sharper focus. Not diminishing the originals, the two musicians and the chamber revealed just how well these compositions stand on their own. What remained was not just a memorable melody, but the strength of the writing itself — its architecture, harmony and emotional pacing — all of which proved more than capable of holding an audience’s attention without relying on a sheer scale.
The night opened with a solo piano turn from Chudan on the Stardew Valley Overture. The original score is deceptively simple, yet rich in atmosphere, and live, every bass note landed clean and clear. Chudan’s refined touch and careful control of colour allowed the music to unfold with remarkable warmth and clarity. It felt like being walked gently into the game’s little town, past the farm, up into the hills, into the woods, with the room’s restlessness slowly melting away. By the time Nature’s Crescendo kicked in with its brighter, folksy energy, the concert had found its stride.
Chudan and Chen then teamed up for a four-hand arrangement of the Plants vs Zombies medley, and it showed real ensemble discipline: fast unison runs stayed perfectly in sync, and the melody kept passing between the two of them so smoothly it was sometimes hard to tell who had it. That same tightness carried into the Happy Fight the Landlord theme later in the set, another four-hand piece built more on a shared, locked-in pulse than on either player showing off.
On top of the beautiful pianos, the concert turned into another cantabile mood after Stan, the violinist joined as a trio. It was then that I noticed people beginning to pull out their phones to capture a few moments of the performance. With Stan’s violin carrying the main melody, the interplay between the strings and keys took the whole performance to another level. They started with Dou Quan, the main theme from the beloved Chinese online game Roco Kingdom. His expressive phrasing and beautifully shaped slides painted a magical world before my eyes, making me imagine little elves wandering and embarking on joyful adventures. As fact after chatting with them about this piece, I was delighted to find that my imagination had perfectly matched the world of Roco Kingdom – I was impressed of how vividly they had captured its spirit.
The beautiful travel of this fairy music continued in The Legend of Zelda Main Theme – brought me from the Chinese-game mystery into another magic world. Rather than reducing the music, Chudan and Stan’s arrangement embraced the very qualities that make the original score so distinctive: it revealed that the magic of this well-known fantasy world has never depended on orchestra scale. It lies in the score’s extraordinary ability to create space, atmosphere and a sense of wonder that Stan’s violin brought to life. Without the weight of a full orchestral texture, every pause, every suspended harmony and every fragile melodic gesture seemed to carry greater meaning. For a few moments, St Gabriel’s Church seemed to dissolve. In its place emerged a world of open skies, ancient ruins and quiet wonder, created not through visual effects but through the sensitivity of these musicians.
As dusk settled over Pimlico, the concert gradually drew to its biggest moment: a quintet for the Game of Thrones theme and Prelude to Journey to the West from Black Myth: Wukong. The sound was huge, and the five of them were completely locked in together. For a moment, it genuinely felt like the game screen had opened up right there inside the church. That kind of connection with the audience was the whole point of the night, and it landed. By the end, what stood out most was just how many different shapes the music took across the evening, from one pianist alone at the keys to a full five-piece ensemble, and the care every player put into shaping each note along the way.
You don’t need a symphony orchestra to do justice to a video game soundtrack. That’s the big takeaway here. For anyone who loves a good melody wherever it comes from, this was a refreshing and engaging way to hear familiar music.
By presenting video game music within a classical chamber concert, the programme demonstrated how contemporary popular culture can engage new audiences with live performance while expanding the boundaries of the traditional concert experience. The concert also reflected London’s increasingly diverse musical landscape, where contemporary repertoire can sit comfortably alongside classical performance traditions. Chudan’s performance demonstrated how a young pianist can successfully introduce contemporary repertoire to new audiences through high-quality live performance.
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