Glasgow Royal Concert Hall
Star rating: ***
ANY sentient being, never mind a music lover, will be agog looking at the above star-rating allocated to the concert given by American-Korean violinist Sarah Chang with the English Chamber Orchestra on Wednesday night.
Let me explain. The three stars, for a good, solid, musical and well-organised set of performances, belong wholly to the English Chamber Orchestra. For Sarah Chang, and what she did to Vivaldi's Four Seasons, there can only be zero tolerance and a star rating to match.
There's no interpretation here. Let's just report what she did. She hacked and sawed her way through Vivaldi's bullet-proof (or so we thought) set of violin concertos with the ugliest, most heavy-handed, aggressively over-forced violin playing it has been my misfortune to hear.
She stomped her clogs, kicked out with her legs and whacked the fingerboard with the digits of her left hand so that the percussive impact was louder than the note in hand. From time to time she slid from one note to another. Elsewhere, under the delusion that she was Eric Clapton (with a dash of Ginger Baker), she bent the notes beyond the written notation and sense.
Above all, with her truly horrible sound and Rambo-style ferocity of projection, she ruthlessly brutalised Vivaldi's four concertos. It was an embarrassing, insulting, incoherent and indulgent farrago of nonsense.
Enough. Bravo to violinist Stephanie Gonley and her ECO players for keeping their faces straight and their minds on the music being shredded before their ears. Their own fine playing of Bach's Brandenburg Three and Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings constituted the musical performances.
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