Sarah Chang – one of the greatest child prodigies of our era
Last edited Sun Mar 31, 2013, 02:14 PM - Edit history (1)
Korean-American Sarah Chang comes from a family where both her foreign-born parents were musicians. She took up the violin at the age of three and at the age of five she auditioned by performing the challenging Bruch Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor and was accepted to study at Julliard. At the age of eight she was performing with the New York Philharmonic (Tchaikovsky violin concerto) under Zubin Mehta and the Philadelphia Philharmonic. When Zubin Mehta first heard her he couldn’t believe that a child could express such deep adult emotions in her playing and remarked: “she must be a midget - no-one could play all that repertoire and play so wonderfully”. At the age of nine she met world famous violinist Yehudi Menuhin who became her mentor and who described her as "the most wonderful, the most perfect, the most ideal violinist I have ever heard." In a documentary filmed during her tour of England at the age of ten, Menuhin describes not only her flawless technical virtuosity but the depth of her emotional soul, as a mere child. Legendary violin instructor Dorothy Delay who was her violin teacher at Julliard described her as follows: “I have compared her playing with records of other prodigies and I don't think anything quite like her has ever happened before. (…) I think she was six, or perhaps five, and she played the Mendelssohn concerto with real emotional involvement, and I said to myself, ~I have never seen or heard anything quite like it in my entire life.'" At the age of ten, she recorded her first album which rose on the classic Billboard charts to become a best-seller.
Here she is at the age of ten, performing while on a tour of England, with her mentor the great Yehudi Menuhin providing commentary.
In the years since, she has grown into adulthood and is recognized as one of the world’s foremost violinists. For the 2004 Olympics, she was selected to carry the Olympic Torch in New York. In 2005, Yale University dedicated a chair in Sprague Hall in her name. In 2011, President Obama appointed her to be a State Department Special Cultural Envoy on behalf of the United States as well as appointed her to the Presidential Commission on Russian Relations. She’s now thirty-two years old.
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