Chang makes most of her roots

The word “prodigy” enjoys its heaviest use in the world of classical music. There, performers most often show phenomenal talent at a very early age.

Then what? Stardom, or oblivion?

One of the happiest cases of a stunning rise to stardom is Sarah Chang. A violin prodigy who made her New York Philharmonic debut when she was 8 and followed a year later with a performance with her hometown band, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Chang has gone on to a hugely successful career both on the concert stage and in the recording studio.

Chang, 26, will appear with the Spokane Symphony on Friday night playing Jean Sibelius’ Concerto in D minor. Music director Eckart Preu will conduct a program that also includes Carl Nielsen’s Symphony No. 2 (“The Four Temperaments”) and Einojuhani Rautavaara’s “Cantus Arcticus.”

“I just came back from six back-to-back performances with the Israel Philharmonic, and I went from there to culture shock in Las Vegas,” Chang said in a telephone interview from Reno.

She had just performed the Sibelius Concerto with Las Vegas Symphony and was preparing for two performances of the work with the Reno Symphony.

Chang grew up in Philadelphia in a musical household.

“Dad is a violinist and Mom is a composer,” she says. “I started on the piano when I was 3, but soon I wanted a violin.”

She began violin lessons with her father when she was 4.

“We lived right around the corner from the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. It is a fantastic school, so it would have been easy for me to go there,” Chang says.

“But Dad had been a student of Dorothy Delay at Juilliard. So I auditioned for Miss Delay, and we started making regular trips to New York.”

Delay, who died in 2002, was teacher to many of today’s foremost violinists including Itzhak Perlman, Gil Shaham and Midoi Goto.

“Miss Delay was like a second grandmother to me,” Chang recalls. “There was nothing I did not talk with her about. Not just music, but everything.”

Conductor Zubin Mehta heard Chang play, and at age 8, she became the youngest soloist on a New York Philharmonic subscription concert, performing Paganini’s Violin Concerto No. 1.

Chang’s whirlwind of performances, prizes and recordings began. She was awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant at 12, was Gramophone Magazine’s Young Artist of the Year at 13, and won the Echo Schallplattenpreis (the German equivalent of the Grammy) at 14.

“When I was growing up,” Chang says, “I really liked listening to the recordings of the great violinists of the Golden Age – people like Heifetz and Kreisler and those players of their time.

“But the violinist who most influenced me directly, though, was Isaac Stern. He was always there for us – listening to us play, giving us lessons, just serving as an example for what we should be like as a musician and as a person.”

While still a teenager, Chang recorded Sibelius’ Violin Concerto with the Berlin Philharmonic under Mariss Jansons.

“I started working on this piece when I was 7,” she says, “and I don’t even know how many times I have played it – hundreds of times, though. It is so full of beauty and passion.

“Every time I play it, there is something new and wonderful, and every conductor I work with shows me something new about it, too. It’s a very special work for me.”

Chang’s recordings for the EMI label include a dozen of the standard violin concertos (and some, like the Richard Strauss Concerto, not so standard) as well as virtuoso solo works and chamber music.

She has been exploring a corner of the repertoire that is new to her.

“The part of the literature that has become my most recent interest is baroque music,” Chang says. “Believe or not, my next recording project is Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons.’

“I know it’s been recorded dozens of times, but it gives me the chance to experiment with ornaments and improvisation that is so much a part of the baroque style – things that I have not done so much with in the past.”

Friday’s program features works by composers from Europe’s Baltic region. Denmark will be represented by Carl Nielsen, whose Second Symphony is a musical description of the four temperaments.

In addition to Sibelius’ Concerto, conductor Eckart Preu has selected an unusual work by Finland’s most famous living composer, Einojuhani Rautavaara. His “Cantus Arcticus” employs the recorded sounds of birds from the Finnish arctic and sub-arctic regions in addition to full orchestra.

Chang will join host Verne Windham of KPBX-FM to talk about her career at Classical Chats, the symphony’s pre-performance conversation, today at 12:15 p.m. in the council chambers at City Hall. The 30-minute program will be televised on City Cable Channel 5.

Morihiko Nakahara, the symphony’s associate conductor, will discuss the music on the program Friday at 7 p.m. in the INB Performing Arts Center auditorium as a part of the Gladys Brooks Pre-Concert Talks series.