That’s the ticket

Who: Violinist Sarah Chang, with pianist Ashley Wass

When: 8 p.m. Thursday, March 7

Where: Jackson Hall, Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts

Tickets: $35-$99 general, $17.59-$49.50 students; www.mondaviarts.org, 530-754-2787

Local music lovers with fairly l-o-n-g memories may recall Sarah Chang’s arrival as a recording artist in the 1990s. She appeared with the New York Philharmonic when she was only 8.

Her first album — appropriately titled “Debut” — was recorded when she was 10 years old, and released in 1992. The cover of that album features the young violinist in a bright red dress, standing in front of three adult men in black tuxedos and white dress shirts. Not yet a teenager, she was about chest high in comparison to the three guys, whose heads are not in the picture.

Chang was only a few years older, 14, when she gave her first concert in Davis, in the fall of 1995 at Freeborn Hall. By then, she’d released a second album, with a third on the way.

Now she’s coming back to town, a mature artist in her early 30s. She’ll appear at the Mondavi Center at 8 p.m. Thursday, March 7, in recital with pianist Ashley Wass. Chang’s recent schedule confirms that she’s working at a very high level indeed. It includes a tour with the Dresden Philharmonic last fall, as well as appearances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Orchestre National de France. She played dates with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 2012 and with the Russian National Orchestra in 2011, in addition to numerous recitals.

She now has 20 albums to her credit, all on the EMI label, which signed her to a contract very early in her career.

Lately, Chang has been performing a recent arrangement of music from Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story,” created for Chang in 2011 by composer David Newman. Chang has been performing the orchestra version of the piece in some concerts, including an appearance at the Hollywood Bowl; for her Mondavi Center appearance, she’ll play the version for violin and piano.

Also on her Mondavi program will be the Violin Sonata No. 2 by Sergei Prokofiev, originally written as a flute sonata in 1942 (after Prokoviev returned to the Soviet Union), and then rescored as a violin piece in 1943, when the composer was living in a remote part of the Ural Mountains — some distance from the major Russian cities, which were taking a pounding from Nazi bombers during World War II.

Chang also will perform Niccolo Paganini’s showy Cantabile in D Major (Op. 17, dating from the 1820s) and the popular Chaconne in G Minor attributed to Tomaso Antonio Vitali (1663-1745), though some scholars believe it might have been written by another composer who shared the name Vitali. Regardless, this Chaconne has been part of Chang’s recital repertoire for several years. Listeners can find a performance video on YouTube.

British pianist Ashley Wass (born 1977) trained at the Royal Academy of Music, and has recorded several albums for the Naxos label. A prize winner in past years at the London International Piano Competition and the Leeds Piano Competition, he gave a solo recital in London’s Wigmore Hall in January. Chang and Wass have worked together in the past; they performed at Carnegie Hall in April 2007.

Tickets for the March 7 concert at 8 p.m. in the Mondavi Center’s Jackson Hall are $35-$99 general, $17.50-$49.50 for students, available at www.mondaviarts.org or 530-754-2787.

— Reach Jeff Hudson at [email protected] or 530-747-8055.

Style: "NOW LEAVES"

Sarah Chang appears at the Mondavi Center at 8 p.m. Thursday, March 7. Courtesy photo

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