It's easy enough to earn
ovations when you're an adorable ten-year-old girl who can plant your
feet bravely on a stage and play the devil out of Paganini. Well, maybe
"easy" isn't the best word to use in a sentence that also
contains "Paganini," but the point is that a phenomenally
talented preteen violinist equally at ease with bravura and cantilena
passages is bound to become an audience and media darling. That's what
happened to Sarah Chang in the early 1990s. At age eight, after only
two years of study at Juilliard, during which she still regarded playing
the violin as a hobby, she auditioned for Zubin Mehta and Ricardo Muti
and bowled them over. Soon she found herself playing Paganini, Tchaikovsky,
and Sibelius concertos with the world's greatest orchestras, with an
EMI recording contract tucked into her little frock.
But now that Chang has passed
her 22nd birthday, she has to pass muster with all the other adult soloists
vying for attention. No more half-awed, half-patronizing newspaper articles
about how she fits high school, driving lessons, shopping, and casting
her first vote in with violin practice and performing. No more automatic
goodwill just because she's a gifted child. Now she must demonstrate
that she's a gifted grown-up.
She seems to be doing it
quite well, thank you. Not only does she continue to charm colleagues
and journalists with her manner—somehow sparkling and self-effacing
at the same time–but she can still play the devil out of whatever
she sets her mind to.
And it's not just a matter
of virtuoso fireworks. In the October 2003 issue of Strings,
Edith Eisler characterized Chang's approach well in a review of her
new recording of the Dvorák Violin Concerto: "consummate
technical ease, a gorgeous, vibrant, flawlessly beautiful tone, and
a heartfelt, but unsentimental expressiveness."
the transition from child
prodigy to adult artist, says Chang, "went as painlessly as it
possibly could. The earliest years were the easiest, of course. When
you're making your debut and you're the new face on the block, everything
is fun and exciting and new. In the teenage years it's hard enough growing
up anyway, but I had a great support system, from my parents and my
record company.
"The big change for
me came on a personal level when I was 15 or 16," she adds. "I
had more control over my calendar, and started doing concerts because
they were projects I believed in and conductors I wanted to work with.
It became much more about the music and not about me. It was never about
filling up the calendar, but when you have more say over your calendar,
you realize how precious every single date is. Every concert I do now,
It is because I adore the
orchestra or the city I'm in, or I'm making music with musicians I truly
respect.
"I hope it's like this
forever."
She has noticed a slight
change in the way conductors treat her now. "The conductors I started
out with when I was eight and nine saw me grow up, and I love the fact
that they're my musical parents in a way," she says. "We've
gone through so much repertoire together. In the midteen years you go
through that gawky, uncomfortable stage, and then one day you realize,
'I can shop in the women's department now!' That's about when we could
go out to dinner and they'd stop making fun of me for not being able
to drink. They treat me as an equal partner, for which I'm grateful."
It's not uncommon for a
prodigy to emerge from childhood feeling a little rattled, or perhaps
deprived of the natural delights and horrors of being a kid. Not Chang,
who says she is fully satisfied with her offstage life during her childhood
and teen years. "I went to Juilliard, but that was just on Saturdays,"
she points out. "Monday to Friday I would go to a normal school,
and that helped a great deal, because most of my friends to this day
are nonmusicians. They are the ones I call when I'm on the road and
need to talk to somebody. They are friends I trust completely. It's
wonderful to have a fundamental basis for life like this."
"I think the fact that
she's so impressive as a total package says a lot about her family life,"
says David Kim, concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra, a group
with which Chang has often played. "I think her folks have done
a fabulous job in raising this young woman, and there's a lot to commend
on their part. She's a beautiful person and an important artist; none
of that is possible without a support system behind the scenes, and
she has obviously had that."
Chang has devoted a lot
of time to certain concertos that aren't quite standard repertoire but
should be, like the Goldmark, Strauss, and Dvorák. Yet Chang
says she isn't consciously trying to make her mark in music that hasn't
been done to death by a hundred other violinists. "The problem
is I love the concertos that have been done to death! They'll
always be my favorites," she says. "That was the repertoire
I learned during my Juilliard years, and to this day I love performing
those works on stage. I wasn't trying to make a point by doing Goldmark
or Strauss; I stumbled onto those concertos and thought, 'These are
truly beautiful—why don't people play them?'
"The Goldmark was played
during Milstein's era, but for some reason it was lost after that. And
it was difficult to get the music, let me tell you. So this is my way
of still learning new things, and I'm commissioning works all over the
place. It's terribly exciting to work with living composers, even though
when they tear a piece apart and start from scratch it drives me nuts."
One composer preparing a
piece for her is jazzman Eddie Karam. Chang also has worked with Jack
Elliott and Korean-American composer Donald Sur.
"If I go back and relearn
something I started playing when I was eight," she continues, "the
old ideas and old habits are so stuck in the back of my head. But with
something new to me, whether it's Goldmark or something I've commissioned,
there is an extra layer of depth and maturity in what I can do now.
And I do a lot more research than I ever did before; I read about the
composer, and listen to older recordings. There's a lot more heart to
doing something like this."
Chang is putting her heart
into a full schedule this season. She is performing with some of her
favorite orchestras: the New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony,
Los Angeles Philharmonic, and above all the Philadelphia Orchestra.
"That's my home orchestra," she says, "so when I play
there I get to sleep in my own bed, which is really nice."
Also on the slate are tours
with the London Symphony, a swing through Asia, a recording of Shostakovich
and Prokofiev concertos with Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic,
the release of a French sonata CD (Franck, Saint-Saëns, Ravel)
with pianist Lars Vogt, and several more chamber-music projects.
Chamber music is relatively
new to Chang, yet it's something to which she has already become devoted.
"It's something I've insisted on for my musical growth and pleasure,"
she says. "The wonderful thing about chamber music is that the
repertoire is endless. The more you play, the more you realize you've
just scratched the surface. And I've met some amazing colleagues this
way."
One such colleague is pianist
Yefim Bronfman, who joined Chang and cellist Lynn Harrell for a performance
of the Tchaikovsky Piano Trio in A minor, Op. 50. Bronfman and Harrell
had played it before, but this was a new experience for Chang.
"It's a very difficult
piece and she played it beautifully," Bronfman recalls. "It
was nice to have some fresh ideas from her. She's a lovely person, very
outgoing and fun loving. She makes everybody feel comfortable around
her." Didn't Chang seem intimidated working in close quarters with
two such seasoned and well-known partners? "Hopefully only by our
size," Bronfman says.
David Kim has been accompanying
Chang ever since he joined the Philadelphia Orchestra nearly five years
ago. Last summer, he invited her to join him in Prokofiev's Sonata for
Two Violins in C major, Op. 56, at the Kingston Chamber Festival, which
Kim directs at the University of Rhode Island.
"She's just as intense,
as committed, and as unique in chamber music as when she's playing a
concerto," Kim says. "Her musical voice doesn't change at
all. I was curious what it would be like playing with one of these big
stars. I wondered whether she would be inflexible, or in the dark about
playing chamber music, and it turns out she is a first-rate chamber
musician. She has the ability to work well and easily with others, on
a personal and musical level.
"There is something
so finished and mature about her entire presence that I find very impressive
for such a young person," he adds. "And yet what I love about
Sarah is that she's such a good person; she really is down-to-earth,
and she doesn't have any prima-donna issues. She's a good egg, and I'm
so proud of her as a fellow Korean-American musician."
Chang sometimes has small
doubts about being "finished and mature." That's why she's
done very little teaching so far. "I've been hesitant to do that
because I feel extremely young," she says. "I did my first
master class in Singapore last year; I wasn't fully comfortable that
some of the people playing were my age or even older. But it's not just
an age thing. I still feel that I'm growing; I'm learning every day."
Kim says he notices "a
certain evolution happening in her playing every time I hear her. It's
very, very satisfying to see her continue to develop her own voice."
Cultivating that voice is
the greatest challenge ahead for her, in the opinion of Sir Colin Davis,
who is the conductor of Chang's new recording of Dvorák's Violin
Concerto, Op. 53, and also a longtime collaborator. "Sarah is a
fantastically gifted musician and I have known her since she was 11
years old," he says. "She is now a grown-up and she is searching
for what makes the transition from being a kid to being a grown-up.
She has retained her talent throughout all the years and the world is
open to her. It's a question now of how she can develop."
Her development is not something
that worries pianist Bronfman. "I see room for artistic growth
in everybody, myself included," he says. "To be able to play
a Beethoven sonata takes the work of a lifetime, so yes, I see growth
for her as much as anyone else, and I think she realizes it, too. And
when you come to realize that, you have already matured in a certain
way."
Chang counts herself lucky
to have been working all these years with musicians the caliber of Bronfman,
Davis, Martha Argerich, and Yo-Yo Ma. Those collaborations, she suggests,
are the true foundation of her artistic evolution in the years to come.
"I have so much respect
for these people," she says. "And I'm so lucky to have so
much time ahead of me to work with them, since I am still in the learning
process—learning about music and about life."
What Chang Plays
Sarah Chang plays a 1717
Guarneri del Gesù, one that she babies. Reluctant to take it
under hot lights, she usually goes to photo sessions with a stand-in,
"a very, very pretty violin that doesn't sound like anything."
The Guarneri, she says,
is "a dark instrument, with a beautiful, luscious dark tone, but
it also has almost a Strad-like brilliance, and at the same time I can
coax it into being very sweet. But it's very temperamental; I think
it mirrors my own personality. In the mountains, in Aspen or Switzerland,
or somewhere very humid, it will tell me it's unhappy."
She alternates among four
bows, depending on the music she's playing. For Mozart and Bach, she
prefers her Pajeot; she turns to a Sartory for "the big-whammy
concertos, the Tchaikovsky and Sibelius." For everything else,
she alternates between two Dominique Peccattes. She also owns a John
Norwood Lee bow.
In the strings department,
Chang is pickiest about her E strings; she prefers those made by Jargar
and Westminster.
All these items contend
for space within her violin case with her passport, plane tickets, faxes,
a sewing kit, and double-sided tape (in case the straps of her gown
fall off), and sometimes even her laptop computer. "I carry my
entire life in my case," she says.
Photo of Sarah Chang: Sheila
Rock
