🇰🇷🇺🇸 Sarah Chang

Zubin Mehta had been conducting major orchestras for three decades when an eight-year-old walked into an audition with the Philadelphia Orchestra. He was not expecting what he heard. Sarah Chang played — the Bruch concerto, full speed, with fire and intelligence and complete technical control — and when she finished, Mehta said something that has been quoted in every account of her career since: she was, he declared, the most electrifying young musician he had ever seen. He invited her to perform with the Philadelphia Orchestra immediately. She was eight years old. She accepted.

Sarah Jung-ah Chang was born on December 10, 1980, in Philadelphia, to Korean parents who had both studied music. Her father had trained as a violinist in Seoul before immigrating to the United States; her mother was a pianist. The household was saturated with music in the particular way that only households where both parents are professional musicians can be — not casually or as background sound, but with the urgency of people who have dedicated their lives to it. Sarah received her first violin at age four, a one-sixteenth-sized instrument suited to a child's hands. Within a year it was apparent that she was not simply gifted for her age but gifted beyond any normal category of comparison.

The Juilliard School's primary instrument division, which accepts children as young as five in special circumstances, auditioned Sarah in 1986. She played the Bruch Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor — not a simplified excerpt but the complete concerto, a full-scale romantic work of considerable difficulty. The faculty admitted her. At five, Sarah Chang became a Juilliard student, working with Dorothy DeLay, the same legendary teacher who had shaped Midori Goto and Itzhak Perlman. The comparison between student and teacher is, in this case, a lineage of extraordinary precision: DeLay had an almost uncanny ability to identify the particular qualities of a given student's gifts and build toward them rather than imposing a uniform method.

The Philadelphia Orchestra debut in 1989 was the public announcement of what the Juilliard faculty had known privately for four years. Mehta's enthusiasm was not merely diplomatic; he continued to champion Chang and to appear on recordings with her. Her first commercial album, Debut, was recorded when she was ten and released in 1992 on EMI Classics; it debuted on the Billboard classical chart and introduced her to a global audience. The marketing of a child prodigy can be an ugly business, and there have been cases in the history of classical music of young musicians who were pushed too hard and too early, whose technique was exploited before it could develop fully, and who burned out before reaching adulthood. Chang's story was different. She was managed with unusual care, given time to develop alongside her performing schedule, and her playing deepened as she grew rather than leveling off.

By her early teens she was performing 150 concerts a year with the world's major orchestras — the Berlin Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, the London Symphony, the Chicago Symphony — under conductors including Simon Rattle, Claudio Abbado, and Colin Davis. She had by then accumulated a repertoire that most adult soloists would envy: the standard concertos by Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, Bartók, Bruch, Mendelssohn, Paganini. She played them all not as a precocious child mimicking adult interpretations but as a musician with her own clear views about the music, views that asserted themselves increasingly as she aged.

Her recording career for EMI Classics produced some of the most commercially successful classical violin albums of the 1990s and 2000s. The Tchaikovsky concerto, the Bruch concerto, the Prokofiev concertos, the Bartók concertos — each release was an event in the classical world. Awards followed: the ECHO Klassik, the Gramophone Award, recognition from virtually every major institution in classical music. But what the awards did not capture was the quality that had struck Mehta at that audition: the electricity. Live, in a hall, playing with an orchestra, Sarah Chang generated the kind of audience response that only a handful of performers in any generation can produce — the feeling that something unrepeatable was happening right now.