Chihyun Chang

In the 1930s an international chain reaction of disparate elements led to a creative collision in the U.S.A growing sense of the AMERICAN in American music burst into full flower as Vienna met Hollywood and classical met jazz. This album celebrates this amazing development in American music. Growing up in the Boston area, Helen Chang Haertzen studied under Bo Youp Hwang and Roman Totenberg. She attended Philadelphia s Curtis Institute, the Salzburg Mozarteum and the San Francisco Conservatory. Her principal teachers also included Szymon Goldberg, Felix Galimir, Ruggiero Ricci and Camilla Wicks. Haertzen was a prizewinner of the Karol Lipinski-Wieniawski Competition in Poland. In 2017, the Minnesota State Arts Board awarded her the Artist Initiative Grant. She is joined on this release by Denis Evstuhin, Silver Ainomae, and Oleg Levin.

American violinist Elizabeth Chang’s new album Transformations on Albany Records brings together works by Leon Kirchner (1919-2009), Roger Sessions (1896-1985) and Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951).

This 2005 recording of Han-Na Chang performing Shostakovich's Cello Concerto No. 1 and Cello Sonata is a follow-up to her 2003 recording of Prokofiev's Cello Concerto and Cello Sonata. In both cases, Chang is accompanied by Antonio Pappano either leading the London Symphony Orchestra or playing the piano. As on the earlier disc, Chang is primarily a soloist with a strong arm and a dazzling technique, and her performances sparkle with energy and twinkle with enthusiasm.

Young cellist Han-Na Chang, Korean-born and trained in the U.S. by Mstislav Rostropovich, is a newcomer to Baroque music, having released a mixture of cello classics and late-Romantic and contemporary concertos up to this time. Here she delivers a set of seven Vivaldi cello concertos that Rostropovich himself might have helped her shape; it's something of a throwback to the way Vivaldi was played 30 or 40 years ago.