Recognized as one of classical music's most gifted performers, super-star violinist Sarah Chang performed Mendelssohn's last large orchestral work and one of the most popular violin concerti of all time. Maestro Peter Oundjian returned to Caramoor's podium in a program containing unparalleled lyric beauty and unsurpassed tragedy.
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ABOUT THE MUSIC
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Overture to Magic Flute, K. 620
Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart, who began to call himself Wolfgang Amadeo about 1770 and Wolfgang Amadč in 1777, was born in Salzburg, Austria, on January 27, 1756, and died in Vienna on December 5, 1791. He composed Die Zauberflöte in the summer of 1791, completing the score in September; the overture, composed last, was written on the 28th. The opera received its first performance at the Theater auf der Wieden in Vienna on September 30. The score calls for flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets in pairs, three trombones, timpani, and strings.
In The Magic Flute, Mozart creates a musical world unlike any other: a world in which an evil queen expresses her foul intentions through the most elaborate coloratura, a child of nature covered with bird feathers sings in the accents of popular song, a prince and princess undergo trials to elevate them above the mere external rank of aristocracy to the higher rank of “Mensch” (human being) in song of elevated simplicity, and a fatherly priestlike figure sings what Bernard Shaw once described as the only music ever written by a human being fit for the mouth of God.
The theme of man’s higher and lower natures, symbolized by day and night, with the powerfully inevitable musical triumph of day at the end of the opera, made the work itself a totem for a whole world view. Beethoven regarded The Magic Flute as one of the marvels of the age. The least symbol-minded viewer cannot miss the fact that the opera is about much more than its surface pretends to tell.
It is widely known that Mozart, like many artists and intellectuals of his day, was an active Freemason at a time when that secret organization stood for liberalizing influences of the Enlightenment in a Vienna that was still largely under an oppressive control of the State hand-in-glove with the Church. The Magic Flute is filled with the symbols of Masonic rite, one of the most prominent of which is the number three: there are three Ladies, three Boys, three knocks at the doors of the temple, and three musical instruments (pipes, flute, and bells) onstage. Mozart puts the entire opera into a “three-key” of E-flat, which has three flats in the signature. And because the opera ends in that key, Mozart’s inevitable practice is that the overture must also be in the same key.
The overture begins with a slow introduction consisting of three harmonies, scored for the full orchestra, introducing a searching Adagio. This is followed by a lively Allegro with a quasi fugal development. Early listeners may have been confused by this abrupt shift from the churchly to the farcical, but those who know the opera can appreciate how Mozart foreshadows in these first measures the extraordinary range of the musical language that will follow. His overture hints at a single internal musical reference from the opera (the threefold chord sounded as Tamino seeks admission to the initiation). Beyond that he works out his musical ideas in a straightforward way, only slightly colored in the coda by a threatening turn figure, fortissimo, which yields to the warm sunshine of the final E-flat major.
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Felix Mendelssohn
Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64
Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn was born in Hamburg on February 3, 1809, and died in Leipzig on November 4, 1847. He planned a violin concerto as early as 1838, but it was not until 1844 that he settled down to serious work on it; the finished score is dated September 16, 1844. The first performance took place in Leipzig under Niels Gade’s direction, with Ferdinand David as the soloist. The concerto is scored for solo violin with an orchestra consisting of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets all in pairs, timpani, and strings. Duration is about 26 minutes.
Ferdinand David (1810 1873) was one of the most distinguished German violinists and teachers of his day. When the twenty-seven-year-old Mendelssohn became director of the Gewandhaus concerts in Leipzig in 1836, he had David, just a year his junior, appointed to the position of concertmaster. The relationship between composer and violinist was marked in a letter from Mendelssohn to David on July 30, 1838: “I’d like to write a violin concerto for you next winter; one in E minor sticks in my head, the beginning of which will not leave me in peace.”
But having said as much, Mendelssohn was not in a hurry to complete the work. He sketched and drafted portions of it in at least two distinct stages over a period of years, and his correspondence with David is sometimes filled with the violinist’s urgent plea that he finish the piece at last. Busy with many administrative activities, Mendelssohn wasn’t able to work seriously on the concerto until July 1844. By mid-September the concerto was finished.
David was Mendelssohn’s adviser on matters of technical detail regarding the solo part; he must have motivated the composer’s decision to avoid sheer virtuoso difficulty for its own sake. In fact, David claimed that it was these suggestions of his, which made the concerto so playable, that led to the work’s subsequent popularity. It is no accident that Mendelssohn’s concerto remains the first major Romantic violin concerto that most students learn.
At the same time it is, quite simply, one of the most original and attractive concertos ever written. The originality comes from the new ways Mendelssohn found to solve old formal problems. Ever since Antonio Vivaldi had set his seal on the Baroque concerto with over 500 examples, certain features had been passed on from one generation to another. First of all, the traditional concerto built its first movement on a formal pattern that alternated statements by the full orchestra (ritornellos) with sections featuring the soloist. This was effective when the ritornellos were short summaries of the main idea functioned like the pillars of a bridge to anchor the soloist=s free flight. But as first movements took on the shape of a symphonic sonata form, the orchestral ritornello got longer and longer. Instead of waiting perhaps a minute or two to hear the soloist, the audience had to wait five minutes or more. Proportions seemed skewed.
In his last two piano concertos, Beethoven tried to change that somewhat by introducing the soloist and establishing his personality at the outset, and then proceeding with the normal full orchestral ritornello. Mendelssohn takes the much more radical step of dispensing with the tutti ritornello entirely, fusing the opening statement of orchestra and soloist into a single exposition. This was part of his design from the very beginning. Even the earliest sketch of the first movement shows the two measures of orchestral “curtain” before the soloist introduces the principal theme.
The other problem of concerto form that Mendelssohn attacked in a new way is that of the cadenza. Normally, just before the end of the movement, the orchestra pauses on a chord that is the traditional signal for the soloist to take off alone. Theoretically only two chords are necessary after this point for the movement to end (though in practice there is usually a somewhat longer coda). But everything comes to a standstill (as far as the composer’s work is concerned) while we admire the sheer virtuosity of the soloist, despite the fact that the cadenza might be outrageously out of style with the rest of the piece or that it may be so long and elaborate as to unbalance the composition to which it is attached.
The problem is not perhaps quite so serious when the composer himself provides the cadenza, because it is then at least in an appropriate style. But the absurdity of coming right up to the end of the movement and suddenly putting everything on hold is unchanged. Mendelssohn’s solution is logical and utterly unique. He writes his own cadenza for the first movement, but instead of making it an afterthought, he places it in the heart of the movement, allowing the soloist the chance to complete the development and inaugurate the recapitulation! Until that time—and rarely afterwards—no other cadenza ever played so central a role in the structure of a concerto.
Finally, Mendelssohn linked all the movements together without a break, a pattern that had been used earlier in such atypical works as Weber’s Konzertstück for piano and orchestra, but never in a work having the temerity to call itself a concerto. Yet we can’t imagine the Liszt concertos and many others without this change.
The smooth discourse of the first movement, the way Mendelssohn picks up short motives from the principal theme to punctuate extensions, requires no highlighting. But it is worth pointing out one of the loveliest touches of orchestration at the arrival of the second theme, which is in the relative major key of G. Just before the new key is reached, the solo violin soars up to high C and then floats gently downward to its very lowest note, on the open G-string, as the clarinets and flutes sing the tranquil new melody. Mendelssohn’s lovely touch here is to use the solo instrumentCand a violin at that, which we usually a high voice—to supply the bass note, the sustained G, under the first phrase; it is an inversion of our normal expectations, and it works beautifully.
When the first movement comes to its vigorous conclusion, the first bassoon fails to cut off with the rest of the orchestra, but holds his note into what would normally be silence. The obvious intention here is to forestall intrusive applause after the first movement; Mendelssohn gradually came to believe that the various movements of a large work should be performed with as little pause as possible between them, and this was one way to do it (though it must be admitted that the sustained bassoon note has not always prevented overeager audiences from breaking into applause). A few measures of modulation lead naturally to C major and the lyrical second movement, the character of which darkens only with the appearance of trumpets and timpani, seconded by string tremolos, in the middle section. Once again at the end of the movement there is only the briefest possible break; then the soloist and orchestral strings play a brief transition that allows a return to the key of E (this time in the major mode) for the lively finale, one of those brilliantly light and fleet-footed examples of “fairy music” that Mendelssohn made so uniquely his own.
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Modest Mussorgsky
Introduction to Act 1 (Dawn on the Moscow River) from Khovantchina
(completed and orchestrated by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov)
Modest Petrovich Musorgsky was born at Karevo, district of Pskov, on March 21, 1839, and died in St. Petersburg on March 28, 1881. He worked on his opera Khovanshchina on and off over the last years of his life, from 1872, and composed the Prelude in September 1874; the work as a whole remained unfinished at his death. It was put into performable shape by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and the premiere took place in St. Petersburg on February 21, 1886. As orchestrated by Rimsky-Korsakov, the score calls for two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, four horns, timpani, tam-tam, harp, and strings.
The greatest musical dramatist of nineteenth-century Russia died at the age of forty-two, leaving almost as many major works unfinished as finished. Both his early death and the body of projected operas that remained drafts or torsos came about because of his extremely unstable life, largely the result of an addiction to the bottle. Yet Musorgsky is far and away the most original composer of his age, certainly the greatest in setting to music the Russian language, whether in songs or opera. Though he had a lyrical strain that shines in all his music, his most characteristic work is in the naturalistic vein, capturing the rhythms and the natural melody of spoken Russian in his settings. This was regarded by many musicians at the time as “unmusical”; Tchaikovsky, for example, regarded Musorgsky’s music as little more than amateurish. Yet his songs and operas, more than any vocal works by any Russian composer, have taught later Russian musicians how to approach their own language in music (much as Henry Purcell’s work taught Benjamin Britten a great deal about setting English texts).
Of Musorgsky’s large works, only Boris Godunov was completed and performed in his lifetime—and that work was heard in two different versions. Of his earlier operas, Salammbô, based on Flaubert, remained an early fragment, and The Marriage, after Gogol, was finished only through its first act. The two major operas of his later years were a serious opera on a historical theme, Khovanshchina, and a lyric comedy, Sorochintsky Fair. He worked on both of them, more or less simultaneously in alternation, from the early 1870s until he entered his final decline at the end of 1880. During the last month of the composer’s life, when he was confined to a hospital, with occasional bouts of delirium and a paralysis taking over his respiratory system, his friends—including Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov—visited him daily. When they arrived on March 16, 1881, they were informed that Modest Petrovich had died at 5 A.M. Vladimir Stasov, the writer who had been much involved with the work of all the nationalist Russian composers, later recalled:
In the first moments following his death, N.A. Rimsky-Korsakov declared to all the rest of his comrades that he would prepare for publication all of Musorgsky’s compositions which still remained unpublished, and that he would put Khovanshchina in order, finish it, and orchestrate it.
At that time Khovanshchina was almost fully composed in piano score, except for the finale. Rimsky finished and orchestrated the score, bringing it to performance for the first time in 1886. (Most modern performances of Khovanshchina, though, including the production currently in the repertory of the Metropolitan Opera, use a 1958 orchestration by Dmitri Shostakovich, who returned to the composer’s piano-vocal score with the aim of being more faithful to the peculiarities of Musorgsky’s style, which Rimsky always tended to smooth over.)
The title of the opera, a mouthful for any non-speaker of Russian, is virtually untranslatable. The story is set in the late seventeenth century, when the leader of the military police, or Streltsy, is one Prince Ivan Khovansky, who is determined to get the tsar’s throne for his son Andrei, wresting it from the three co regents, Ivan, Peter, and Sophia. When he heard of this, Peter derisively labeled it Khovanshchina—something like “Khovansky-ism.” Perhaps the easiest way to express it in English (taking a stylistic cue from the titles of Robert Ludlum thrillers) would be “The Khovansky Plot.”
The notebook that contains Musorgsky’s piano score for the entire first act of Khovanshchina begins with the opera’s Prelude. It is dated “2 September 74 in Petrograd.” Unlike many operatic preludes of the nineteenth century, this one does not summarize the plot or principal characters of the opera; it is a genre painting pure and simple, sometimes known as “Dawn on the River Moskva.” It is imbued with the spirit of folk song, elaborated progressively as if from singer to singer, presented in the wonderfully delicate colors of Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestral dress.
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Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Francesca da Rimini (Fantasy after Dante), Op. 32
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born in Kamsko Votkinsk, Vyatka Province, May 7, 1840, and died in St. Petersburg, on November 6, 1893. He composed the fantasy Francesca da Rimini in the fall of 1876; it was successfully premiered in Moscow on March 9, 1877. The score calls for three flutes (third doubling piccolo), two oboes and English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two cornets-ŕ-piston, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam, harp, and strings.
The sad tale of Paolo and Francesca has evoked a sympathetic and compassionate response from readers ever since it was told in the fifth canto of Dante’s Inferno early in the thirteenth century. Dante had no doubt seen the dashing Paolo Malatesta when he was Captain of the People in Florence during the poet’s seventeenth year. It is less likely that he ever saw Francesca da Polenta of Rimini, who married Paolo’s brother Gianciotto Malatesta, but he no doubt learned something of her story during his last years, which were spent under the protection of Francesca’s nephew, then lord of Ravenna.
The news of a double murder—Giancotto killed both his wife and his brother when he found out about their illicit love affair—horrified Italy at the time, but Dante’s version of the story gives details transmitted nowhere else that were probably learned from the family. He puts the words into the mouth of Francesca, whom the poet’s persona encounters during his epic journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven in that mammoth poem that is at one a Medieval cosmology, a political statement, a psychological autobiography of what would today be called Dante’s “mid-life crisis,” and on of the world’s greatest works of literature.
Having passed through the first circle of Hell, Limbo, where are found the virtuous heathen, Dante’s guide Virgil brings him to the first region of punishment for sin, the second circle, wherein the lascivious—those who subject reason to desire—are eternally punished by tempestuous winds that drive the tormented souls about unceasingly, just as their unrestrained sensuality drove them in their earthly lives. Dante sees Dido, Helen of Troy, and Cleopatra, but he especially desires to speak to Paolo and Francesca. She tells him, in words filled with the imagery of the poetic romances that were so popular at the time, of the overwhelming force of Love. “Love, which is quickly kindled in the gentle heart...”; “Love, which absolves no one beloved from loving...”; “Love brought us to one death.” These words cause Dante, who had himself been active as a poet of Love, to become pensive and silent until Virgil asks for his thoughts. His only response: “Alas, how many sweet thoughts, what great desire, led them to this woeful pass.” Then, upon Dante’s urging that Francesca tell her tale more fully, she recounts with extraordinary delicacy how she and Paolo came to realize their guilty love. Her words inspired painters, dramatists, and operatic composers. Tchaikovsky inscribed them at the head of the score to his fantasy.
Francesca da Rimini was originally proposed to Tchaikovsky as the subject for an opera. In fact, the critic K.I, Zyantsyev had already completed a libretto. But Zyantsyev was an ardent Wagnerian, while Tchaikovsky was then full of enthusiasm for Carmen. Still, the notion of a composition based on the tale of the lovers trapped in their own untamed drives and emotions clearly appealed to him. He spent part of the summer of 1876 with his brother Modest in Vichy and took a trip with him down the Rhône from Lyon to Avignon and Montpellier during which Modest persistently urged Hamlet, Othello, and Francesca da Rimini as subjects for musical treatment. Tchaikovsky left Modest in France and took a train to Bayreuth, where he planned to attend the first complete cycle of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungen. It was on the train that he started to read Canto V of the Inferno and quickly became absorbed in plans for a symphonic poem. By October 26, back in Moscow, he wrote to his brother with the news that the work was finished in piano score:
I wrote it with love and love has come out well. As to the hurricane [the music depicting the incessant storms in the second circle of Hell], one could have written it something more like Doré’s picture but it did not turn out as I wished. Anyway it is impossible to give proper judgment on this composition so long as it is neither orchestrated nor played....Have I told you that I am taking cold baths in the morning—like Tolia? [his brother Anatoli] It has an excellent effect on my health. I have never felt better (please spit three times2). This (I mean the cold water) had and will have an excellent influence on my work. If Francesca is something fresh and new, it is to a great extent due to water.
Tchaikovsky completed the scoring in just three weeks, by mid-November, and the fantasy received its first performance the following March 9 at a concert of the Russian Musical Society, where it was very favorably received. The composer himself conducted the fantasy in an all-Tchaikovsky concert in St. Petersburg on March 17, 1887, and though he had always dreaded conducting, the performance went well. He wrote his patron Mme. Nadezhda von Meck describing his terror of facing the orchestra the first time, but on this occasion he had overcome his nervousness by the time of the performance, “and if my efforts to conduct were the result of an awful struggle with myself and, maybe, cost me a few years of my life, I am not a bit sorry. I have experienced moments of happiness and felicity.”
In fact Francesca became to some extent Tchaikovsky’s regular war-horse when he had to appear in public as a conductor. Perhaps the last such appearance took place in England, when the University Musical Society at Cambridge celebrated its jubilee in 1893 by inviting a group of distinguished foreign composers to receive honorary doctorates and direct a concert at which each would conduct one of his works. Tchaikovsky’s contribution to the evening was Francesca da Rimini.3
Though generally regarded as a more polished work than Tchaikovsky’s earlier symphonic poem Romeo and Juliet, Francesca da Rimini is less frequently played today. Francesca’s narrative in Dante’s poem, though expressively beautiful, gave little scope for the interplay of characters that might be expressed in music. In the earlier work, Tchaikovsky had composed themes to represent Friar Laurence, the feud between the Capulets and the Montagues, and the love of the two protagonists; these he had arranged with telling effect into a free sonata form.
The formal organization of Francesca da Rimini is simplicity itself—perhaps too simple for a work of such length with so little thematic development: ABA, with each section constructed of a literal or decorated repetition. The core and center of the work is Francesca’s story, first recounted on the clarinet over pizzicato strings. Her touching tale is both preceded and followed by an Allegro vivo in 6/8 time musically depicting the lashing winds of the second circle (characterized by vivid chromaticism and nearly constant counterrhythms). The whole fantasy opens with typically romantic “infernal” music, built of diminished seventh chords (themselves constructed of two interlocking tritones, the tritone being the so-called diabolus in musica, the extremely dissonant interval of the augmented fourth) in a somber march—Andante lugubre—that seems to say, “Abandon hope, as you that enter here.” Just as Paolo and Francesca can find no release from their torment, once we have heard Francesca’s tale, we are plunged directly back into the maelstrom that brings the fantasy to its end without hope of rescue or redemption.
1 In the Arthurian legends, Galeotto was the go-between for Lancelot and Guinevere; hence, a pander.
2A Russian equivalent to “knock wood.”
3 It is amusing to note that the learned doctors of Cambridge seem to have made a point of selecting only works with literary connections for the concert. Could they have been uneasy about the performance of absolute music in the presence of so many classically trained scholars? In addition to Tchaikovsky, the program included Max Bruch’s “The banquet with the Phaeacians,” from Odysseus, Boito’s Prologue to Mefistofele (based on Goethe’s Faust), Saint-Saëns’s Fantasy for piano and orchestra, Africa, and Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite (which, in the event, was not performed, owing to the composer’s illness). They thus managed to evoke the literary shades of Homer, Goethe, Dante, and Ibsen while ostensibly celebrating the power of music.
© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)
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ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Sarah Chang, violin ~ Violinist Sarah Chang is recognized the world over as one of classical music’s most captivating and gifted performers. One of the most remarkable prodigies of any generation, she has matured into a young artist whose musical insight, technical virtuosity, and emotional range continue to astonish. Appearing in the music capitals of Asia, Europe and the Americas, she has collaborated with most major orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony, the Boston Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic, the principal London orchestras, and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam.
Among the esteemed conductors with whom she has worked are Daniel Barenboim, Sir Colin Davis, Gustavo Dudamel, Charles Dutoit, Bernard Haitink, James Levine, Lorin Maazel, Kurt Masur, Zubin Mehta, Riccardo Muti, André Previn, Sir Simon Rattle, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Leonard Slatkin, Michael Tilson-Thomas, and David Zinman. Notable recital engagements have included her Carnegie Hall debut and performances at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., Orchestra Hall in Chicago, Symphony Hall in Boston, the Barbican Centre in London, the Philharmonie in Berlin, as well as the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. She has reached an even wider audience through her many television appearances, concert broadcasts, and best-selling recordings for EMI Classics. The remarkable accomplishments of her career were recognized in 1999 when she received the Avery Fisher Prize, one of the most prestigious awards given to instrumentalists.
As a chamber musician, Ms. Chang has collaborated with such artists as Pinchas Zukerman, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Yefim Bronfman, Martha Argerich, Leif Ove Andsnes, Stephen Kovacevich, Yo-Yo Ma, Lynn Harrell, Lars Vogt, and the late Isaac Stern.
Highlights of Ms. Chang’s 2007-08 season include a European tour with the English Chamber Orchestra and an Asian and US tour with Orpheus culminating in a performance at Carnegie Hall, and appearances with the symphony orchestras of Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Vancouver, as well as the National Symphony Orchestra, the London Symphony, and the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra.
Recent highlights include appearances with the San Francisco Symphony, New York and Los Angeles Philharmonics, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, National Symphony, London Philharmonic, Orchestre National de France with Kurt Masur, Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, and Orpheus on a tour that included a performance at Carnegie Hall. Notable highlights of her 2006-07 season included a European tour with the Pittsburgh Symphony under Hans Graf and a North American tour with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Kurt Masur. In the 2005-06 season, she toured Europe with the London Symphony and Sir Colin Davis (in addition to appearances at the Barbican), the U.S. with the Pittsburgh Symphony under Hans Graf, the Canary Islands with l’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande with Marek Janowski, and the Far East with the English Chamber Orchestra. She also performed in Berlin, Dresden, St. Petersburg, and Vienna.
In the 04–05 season, Ms. Chang performed with the orchestras of Cincinnati, Dallas, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Toronto among others. Other notable engagements in 2004-05 included performances in Australia, Hong Kong, South Korea and Israel, as well as appearances with the Berlin Philharmonic, the London Symphony, and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, plus a chamber music tour of Europe with members of the Berlin Philharmonic.
Ms. Chang records exclusively for EMI Classics, and her most recent disc of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with Orpheus Chamber Orchestra will be released worldwide in the fall of 2007. Her widely lauded recordings include “Fire and Ice,” an album of popular shorter works for violin and orchestra, with Placido Domingo conducting the Berlin Philharmonic; a disc of chamber music for strings (Dvorak’s Sextet and Tchaikovsky’s “Souvenir de Florence”) with current and former members of the Berlin Philharmonic; a recording of the Dvorak Violin Concerto with the London Symphony and Sir Colin Davis along with the Dvorak Piano Quintet (with Leif Ove Andsnes, Alex Kerr, Georg Faust and Wolfram Christ); a disc of French sonatas by Ravel, Saint-Saens and Franck in collaboration with pianist Lars Vogt; and a live recording of the Shostakovich and Prokofiev violin concerti with the Berlin Philharmonic and Sir Simon Rattle.
Born in Philadelphia to Korean parents, Sarah Chang began her violin studies at age 4 and promptly enrolled in the Juilliard School of Music, where she studied with the late Dorothy DeLay. Within a year she had already performed with several orchestras in the Philadelphia area. Her early auditions, at age 8, for Zubin Mehta and Riccardo Muti led to immediate engagements with the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Ms. Chang has appeared on numerous television and radio programs throughout Europe, North America and the Far East. Along with Pete Sampras and Wynton Marsalis, she is a featured artist in Movado’s global advertising campaign “The Art of Time.”
In 2005, Yale University dedicated a chair in Sprague Hall in Ms. Chang’s name. For the June 2004 Olympic games, she was given the honor of running with the Olympic Torch in New York, and that same month, became the youngest person ever to receive the Hollywood Bowl's Hall of Fame award. Also in 2004, Ms. Chang was awarded the Internazionale Accademia Musicale Chigiana Prize in Sienna, Italy. She is a past recipient of the Avery Fisher Career Grant, Gramophone’s “Young Artist of the Year” award, Germany’s “Echo” Schallplattenpreis, “Newcomer of the Year” honors at the International Classical Music Awards in London, and Korea’s “Nan Pa” award. In 2006, she was named by Newsweek as one of the Twenty Top Women on Leadership.
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Peter Oundjian, conductor ~ A dynamic presence in the orchestral world, Peter Oundjian continues to make his mark as one of today’s most exciting faces on the conducting scene. His strong bond with the musicians and community of Toronto continues through the fourth season of his eight year tenure as Music Director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Through his communicative gifts on and off the podium, Mr. Oundjian’s concerts draw capacity audiences as he explores the breadth and depth of orchestral repertoire and as he helps to create compelling seasons featuring world-renowned soloists and guest conductors. At the beginning of his tenure, Mr. Oundjian created the now-annual Mozart Festival and the New Creations Festival. His probing musicality, collaborative spirit, and engaging personality have earned him accolades from musicians and critics alike.
News of Mr. Oundjian and the TSO continues to spread worldwide through the documentary Five Days In September: The Rebirth of An Orchestra, which has won numerous awards at major international film festivals and has been released on DVD with wider distribution planned.
In addition to his post in Toronto, Peter Oundjian continues to serve as Principal Guest Conductor and Artistic Advisor of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, helping to create and launch an innovative multi-disciplinary festival in June 2007. He has also played a major role at the Caramoor International Music Festival in New York for over a decade, and has served as Artistic Advisor and Principal Conductor. From 1998-2003, Mr. Oundjian was the Music Director of the Nieuw Sinfonietta in Amsterdam, and recorded the impressive BIS CD of Beethoven.
Mr. Oundjian’s 2008-2009 season feature return visits to Philadelphia, San Francisco, St. Louis, Houston, and Colorado Symphonies, and the Aspen Festival. Abroad, he will conduct two weeks with the Zürich Tonhalle, and begin an annual relationship with the Radio Philharmonique in Paris. Mr. Oundjian also returns to lead the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood, as well as the Baltimore and Dallas Symphonies, among others.
Born in Toronto, Peter Oundjian was educated in England, where he studied the violin with Manoug Parikian. Subsequently, he attended the Royal College of Music in London, where he was awarded the Gold Medal for Most Distinguished Student and Stoutzker Prize for excellence in violin playing. He completed his violin training at the Juilliard School in New York, where he studied with Ivan Galamian, Itzhak Perlman, and Dorothy DeLay. He was the first violinist of the renowned Tokyo String Quartet, a position he held for fourteen years. Mr. Oundjian is now in his 27th year as a visiting professor at the Yale School of Music. He and his wife Nadine have two children, Lara and Peter.
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