Han-Na Chang plays Vivaldi

In June 2008, Han-Na Chang joined the London Chamber Orchestra and its music director Christopher Warren-Green for a Vivaldi concert at St. John’s, Smith Square in London.  They met up the next day to record these concertos at Abbey Road studios, creating Han-Na’s first recording of Baroque music.

Christopher Warren-Green has been the music director of the London Chamber Orchestra since 1988 (his wife Rosemary Furniss is the concertmaster and artistic director).  His leadership enhances Han-Na’s passionate playing, and the intimate ensemble gives us a delicate yet solid performance.

There’s a particularly vivacious exchange between the soloist and the continuo (in this case cello, double bass, harpsichord and theorbo); Han-Na refers to this group as “the rhythm section” in these concertos.  She says her favorite concerto on this recording is R. 418 in A minor, because it combines so many elements of Vivaldi’s musical personality.  “There’s the vivaciousness, the drive forward, and in the midst of that there’s the sentimental, sort of inwardness…Vivaldi being very pensive, and almost melancholy.”  She describes the slow movement as giving her a sense of improvising over a sea of fog, an expansiveness that made her feel like “a seagull, one bird, just flying and drifting.”

Han-Na has been a cello virtuoso at least since she was 11 years old, when she won the Fifth Rostropovich International Cello Competition, and now she’s branching out as a conductor.  She has produced, with Korea’s cultural television network, MBC-TV, hour-long explorations of Beethoven’s Symphonies Nos. 1, 3, 4, 5 and 7.  In July she was one of just a few conductors who studied intensively for three weeks with Lorin Maazel at the inaugural Castleton Festival in Virginia.

And we’ll be hearing more from Christopher Warren-Green in this region when, in 2010, he becomes the music director of the Charlotte (NC) Symphony Orchestra.