Que Sarah!

Virtuoso violinist Sarah Chang, who turns 16 this month, is wearing her age quite well. She began to play the violin (a one-sixteenth-size) when she was 4, trained at the Juilliard School at 5, and made her professional debut with the New York Philharmonic playing the very grown-up and awesomely difficult Paganini First Concerto on a half-size instrument when she was 10.

Her musician parents restrict the Philadelphia junior-high-schooler to concertizing during vacations and once or twice a month during the school year. This month she performs with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, next month with the National Symphony in Washington, D.C., and in February she returns to the New York Philharmonic.

"The hardest thing about being a performer," she says, "is that you always have to give the audience your best, even if you are sick or jetlagged. But, overall, I think every profession has its ups and downs, and it's just a matter of keeping a smile on your face and moving on."

There are virtually no great instrumentalists who weren't child prodigies, wowing audiences from Versailles to Hollywood since before Mozart, but the word "child" refers only to Chang's age. Her playing—refined, brilliantly aggressive, huge in conception—would be remarkable in a performer of any age in any era.

DAVID DANIEL