Interview with Violinist Sarah Chang
Adulthood is offering a new world of opportunities for this former child prodigy
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 Dvork 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 Dvorˆ°k. 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-Saens, Ravel) with pianist Lars Vogt, and several more chamber-music projects.
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