Iuja Chang

Sarah Chang is certainly an exceptional player; her finely produced tone is characteristically sweet, yet she varies it most imaginatively — in the Concerto's slow movement, for instance, where she follows the changing shades of emotion in the most detailed way. The first movement may have been recorded with more strongly expressed feeling (by Boris Belkin), its finale with more mercurial displays of virtuosity (Xue-Wei), but overall Chang is the equal of any, with relaxed technical command and real feeling for the music. The accompaniment is well balanced and cleanly recorded, with distinguished solo contributions from woodwind and horns.

This miraculous recital was Chang's debut recording, made when she was nine years old. In Sarasate's Carmen Fantasy you can hear some very minor flaws in the technique, which were gone when I heard her play it two years later. There's nothing else to indicate that this is a young violinist, not even the tone Chang draws from a quarter-size violin.

“How often do we step back and realize what a gift it is to have this music in our life?” asks acclaimed trumpeter, composer and Greenleaf Music founder Dave Douglas. On Gifts, his newest Greenleaf project, Douglas harnesses that feeling of simple wonder with a new book of pieces and four intriguing takes on Strayhorn songs, premiering a new quartet with poll-sweeping tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis and two members of the Oscar-nominated post-rock trio Son Lux: guitarist Rafiq Bhatia and drummer Ian Chang. The sound is harmonically spacious, with no bass, but a full, sonically adventurous guitar palette from Bhatia that frames the group’s trumpet-tenor melodic concept in fresh and unexpected ways.

This fascinating recital features three works composed during a short period of tremendous upheaval in the world of music. Szymanowski's Mythes: Trois Poemes, op. 30 was composed in 1915, Dohnanyi's Sonata, op. 21 in 1912, and Bartok's Sonata No. 1 in 1920-21. Violinist Elizabeth Chang writes that "the crosscurrents of multiculturalism and the pursuit of a national identity separate from the prevailing Germanic legacy, are topics with searing relevance to the early 21st century. Probing the connections among the densely intertwined web of musicians of this time yields insight into an inflection point in musical history that unleashed the wildly divergent paths that music composition took as the twentieth century unfolded." This recording presents beautifully detailed performances of three important pieces, performed by two leading virtuosi.