Mature Chang lets self-expression emerge

Sarah Chang has come a long way from her beginnings as a brilliantly virtuosic child prodigy who dazzled audiences with the speed, strength and sonority of her early performances in the mid-1990s.

I was all but alone among critics in finding those long-ago concerts empty and meaningless studies in aggression, endowed with neither warmth nor charm.

Indeed, the cult of the prodigy has always struck me as one of the most debased aspects of the music world. If I were king of the world, I think I would put some kind of ultra-restrictive law on the books that would permit the best and the brightest of our children to flower naturally, to follow their callings, to study their art, to learn about joy and heartbreak, to turn into people before being trotted out as new Superstars. I mistrust the "cute kid" brigade

Superstars.

I mistrust the "cute kid" brigade for two principal reasons: it is deeply exploitative and often ruinous to young artists, and it transforms age — which, after all, provides a natural accumulation of musical and personal experience — into a liability for more seasoned players.

Well, Chang is all grown up now — she will turn 30 next year — and she made what was for the most part a noble showing in her performance of the Brahms Violin Concerto at Galliard Municipal Auditorium Tuesday night, with the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra under the direction of Emmanuel Villaume.

While I still find her playing strangely uneven — flashy sections sometimes take on the rote quality of advanced technical exercises — Chang's best work was musically and intellectually compelling, and sometimes terribly exciting.

What marvelous aplomb she brought to the great finale, which has always seemed to me the apotheosis of gypsy fiddle music! The long opening movement was equally impressive, as Chang soared over the orchestra, every phrase, every nuance welling with feeling.

Only the second movement was something of a letdown: Villaume's tempo struck me as too hurried and the music never quite settled into the seraphic meditative state which is its essence.

I found myself thinking of what yet another ex-prodigy, violinist Nadja Salerno- Sonnenberg, once said about this movement, which begins with a passage imbued with an unearthly beauty.

Still, "the violin never gets the melody!" she complained. "First the oboe gets the theme, then the strings, but the violinist never gets it at all. It's frustrating, like having somebody you love who refuses to look at you."

In any event, it is good to see Sarah Chang emerge from the prodigy factory intact, impressive and infinitely more soulful than we might have had reason to hope for.

The second half of the program was devoted to Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 in B minor ("Pathetique"). Villaume has built up a splendid orchestra this year - the wind playing is particularly fine, although I also admired the deep downy warmth of the string playing.

There were some flubs here and there, a few reminders that the group has been together less than a month, but the urgency and energy of the playing made up for any lack of polish.

And I am grateful to Villaume for the distinctly macabre quality he brought to the third movement, which I felt that I understood as never before.

In truth, this portion of the symphony has always perplexed me: it is built on a rumpty-tumpty march melody that portends much but never actually goes anyplace (this by one of the supreme melodists of classical music!)

Still, on Tuesday, Villaume played up the grotesquerie to the point where I recognized an early foreshadowing of the grimacing, self-lacerating scherzos of the later Gustav Mahler and Dmitri Shostakovich.

This was Tchaikovsky as musical radical, with a bleakly modernist view of the abyss for which he is rarely credited. And, despite all, Villaume's performance was still so propulsive and exciting that the audience broke into cheers.