Han-Na Chang

Han-Na Chang’s latest album for EMI Classics is her first account on disc of Baroque repertoire, specifically cello concertos of Antonio Vivaldi. Han-Na and her partners, the London Chamber Orchestra with Christopher Warren-Green, recorded the concertos at Abbey Road Studios in June 2008 following a performance at St. John’s Smith Square in London.

For Han-Na Chang, Vivaldi represents the “liveliness of harmony and rhythm. …It is in the colours and forms that he creates. Also, the small orchestra needed for a Vivaldi concerto – a small ensemble of strings and harpsichord that improvises during the solo – creates an intimacy between the cello and the orchestra”.

The cello was in its early days as a solo instrument when Vivaldi composed his sonatas and concertos between the early 1700s and the late 1730s. None of his nearly 30 cello concertos was published in his lifetime but they survived in manuscript form. Vivaldi composed them for the Ospedale della Pietà, the orphanage where he taught the violin and directed the orchestra for many years, as well as for colleagues and patrons.

Vivaldi’s cello concertos are deep not only in register but in substance and feeling. The concertos progress in style from the rhythmically and thematically uniform musical language of the first decade of the 1700s to the more diverse idiom of the late 1730s. For example, in the earliest concerto on this recording, RV420 in A minor, believed to date from around 1708, the accompaniment in solo passages is performed by the continuo alone. In later concertos by contrast, there is more dialogue, as opposed to alternation, between solo and tutti and the upper strings share the accompaniment with the continuo. RV403 in D Major, composed in the late 1730s, shows Vivaldi eager to keep up with musical fashions, employing jagged rhythms associated with the French style and a simplification of harmony, counterpoint and texture pointing to what will be known as the Classical style.

“She plays with such conviction that you feel she too could have been the inspiration for great composers. Chang combines raw emotion with a structural grip that, in its way, is even more remarkable in one so young. Gramophone

“The superb South Korean cellist Han-Na Chang turned in an eerily compelling performance in Bernstein's Three Meditations from Mass, an arrangement that swaps the queasy sentimentality of the original oratorio for a far more cogent piece of musical drama.” TheTimes August 08

"[Han-Na] has an enviable power to move her audiences…she’s a natural performer whose musicianship is intense, profound and astonishingly mature." The Strad