Sarah Chang

Eight years old, Sarah Chang played as soloist with the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1989, having auditioned for Zubin Mehta and Riccardo Muti; she had entered Juilliard at five, playing the Bruch G minor concerto. Born in Philadelphia in 1980, she studied with Isaac Stern from the age of six, and with Dorothy DeLay from 1989, at DeLay's New York studio and at Aspen. Her first record was made at ten and issued as Debut in 1992; the Tchaikovsky and Paganini concertos followed within two years, and some twenty albums for EMI after them — Sibelius, Mendelssohn, Vaughan Williams, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Vivaldi's Four Seasons with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra in 2007, and the Bruch and Brahms concertos with Kurt Masur and the Dresden Philharmonic in 2009. Through the busiest years she was giving as many as 150 concerts a season. The Avery Fisher Career Grant came in 1992, Gramophone's Young Artist of the Year in 1993 and the Avery Fisher Prize in 1999; in 2004 she became the youngest musician taken into the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame, and in 2005 Yale dedicated a chair in Sprague Hall to her. She plays a Guarneri del Gesù of 1717, bought from Stern. Since 2018 she has appeared with the Sofia Philharmonic in Sofia. The Accademia Chigiana in Siena and Echo Klassik have both given her prizes, the World Economic Forum named her a Young Global Leader in March 2008, and in 2004 she carried the Olympic torch through New York. Among her other records are the first concertos of Prokofiev and Shostakovich with Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic, the short pieces collected as Fire and Ice with the same orchestra under Plácido Domingo, and Dvořák's concerto with Colin Davis and the London Symphony Orchestra.