From what looks like a vanity production, I glean that Ms. Chang is a major pedagogue at Cleveland State University, in whose Drinko Recital Hall this program was recorded. A former pupil of luminaries Michel Beroff, Yvonne Lorod-Messiaen, and Menahem Pressler, among others, Ms. Chang can claim to have been the first Artist-in-Residence at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. The liner notes proclaim their own, laudatory review, so my comments may well prove superfluous. While all sorts of people take credit for the production, I can’t find what kind of piano Ms. Chang utilized.
Ok, so? What I likewise glean here is an incredibly conservative (and short) set of pieces whose main object is to show off Ms. Chang’s beauty of tone and her clean articulation of
musical figures. She does have a gift for legato phrasing, and she adds a theatrical touch of drama to the characters who populate Schumann’s internal world. Perhaps I should quote the liner notes on her performance of the Liszt–were they written by one of her
pupils, hankering for an “A”? The notes tell me I should experience “sublime tranquility.” Sorry, I feel angst when ordered to emote. As for the liner notes on the Mendelssohn, they beg deeper questions of a quid pro quo I care not to divine. Musically, I might suggest that the Chopin indicates a weakness the young Cliburn had: the tendency to assign equal emotive weight to both crucial thematic passagework and to transitions, misaligning the architecture. But the writer of the notes would long ago have had me tried and convicted for aesthetic, if not amatory heresy, and thus I deign to no further pronouncements. Enjoy the music but chuck the liner notes.
— Gary Lemco
