OK—we’re in a new world. For years, violinists were Russian
and men; now, they tend to be Asian and women.
There are good reasons—classical music is revered in Asia,
parents are much more involved with their children’s education and
extracurricular activity, and—let’s face it—most Asians are much more
rigorously disciplined than the average kid from the West.
And of all Asian violinists, there’s really no one like
Sarah Chang, who was born in South Korea but moved at an early age to
Philadelphia, where her father was to attend Temple University.
She was introduced to the violin at an early age; at five
she was admitted to Julliard’s Pre-College Division, after she auditioned with
the third concerto of Mozart and the Bruch concerto. At age 8, she made her orchestra
debut playing Paganini’s Concerto number 1 with the New York Philharmonic; she
recorded her first album at age nine. By age eleven, she had played with most
of the world’s best orchestras.
And Chang must have had very savvy parents; here’s what she
says about them:
They controlled my schedule so that I did
the important concerts: I did the New York Phil, the Berlin Phil, the Vienna
Phil. I did all the debuts, I did all the big dates that I needed to do. But
then they would stick me back in school. They put a really tight grip on the
schedule. I had – still do have – a variety of managers. But it was very much
my parents who would end up just saying 'No" to everything. They said that
I needed to go to school, and I needed time to learn repertoire. I'm glad they
did that – because now the schedule is insane.
There’s something unnerving about child prodigies—watch the
clip below, and Chang will turn up playing with dazzling pyrotechnical skill.
So for many years, she attended school in Philadelphia, and
traveled to New York on the weekends to study, first with Dorothy DeLay, a
legend whom Chang describes as grandmotherly, hands-on; as well, she seems to
have forced Chang to think critically at an age when most kids cannot.
Chang also did something at a young age that many prodigies
cannot—she conveyed an emotional charge, or perhaps an emotional field, that
wrapped everybody in the audience into its web. Listen to her in the clip below
of the Tchaikovsky violin concert, in a performance when she was eleven.
A fellow musician once told me that child prodigies sail
through their childhoods, and that performing generally has no terror for them.
But what happens when adolescence comes? For many prodigies, they
self-destruct.
Not Chang, who seems to be a genuinely nice, unaffected
person; in one interview, we see her chatting with fans, signing autographs.
She’s clearly highly intelligent and articulate; here’s what she says about
classical music.
I think people in
the classical music world are extremely sophisticated, they know what they're
listening to, they're musically educated, so they know what they want. They
also know good music when they listen to it. I think it's one of the last
remaining really honest forms of music-making. We don't lip sync, we don't have
light shows, we don't have special effects, we don't have anything to distract
or add fluff. We go out and we play, and we either play well or we don't play
well. It's really clean, you either deliver or you don't. I like that sort of
pureness to the industry.
Her preference is for the big, romantic concertos; here, she
speaks about two of the biggest, the Prokofiev and the Shostakovich concertos.
In the clip below, she plays neither Prokofiev nor
Shostakovich, but another composer just as hefty—Jean Sibelius.
Lastly, though she loves the big, “masculine” works, she
delved recently into the more intimate, “feminine” world of Vivaldi and the
Four Seasons. These works, which definitely have warhorse status, are often
performed with period instruments in what are called “historically informed
performances.” Chang takes a sensible approach, cutting the instruments to one
or two players per part, creating a flexible, “chamber music” feeling. And yes,
her playing may be modern, but it’s no less sensitive.
Chang is now 32; she gave her debut with the New York
Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra at age nine. By the time she
retires, she’ll have spent over half a century on the world’s stages.
