Hilary Hahn / Matthias Goerne / Christine Schäfer BACH Violin and Voice

This album has been years in the making. I first played some of these works more than a decade ago, and ever since then I have worked toward assembling an integral project of this repertoire.

My first exposure to Bach for violin and voice came when I was four, just a couple of months after I began to play violin. My father sang in a local choir in those days, and my mother and I went to see his group perform. In the middle of a cantata by Bach, a member of the choir suddenly stepped forward with a violin and played a duet with the soprano. I was mesmerized. The way the instrument's sound wove in and out of the vocal line - sometimes plaintive, sometimes playful, always supple and alive - seemed magical beyond belief.

The amazement broadened to appreciation as I grew older. Encouraged by my childhood teacher, Klara Berkovich, to find models of expression that appealed to me outside of violin, I absorbed much from the recordings of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Peter Pears, Rosa Ponselle and Fritz Wunderlich that played in our house; and every holiday season, as we prepared dinners and exchanged gifts, the Messiah, B-minor Mass and St Matthew Passion sang out from the stereo. There was also a chamber music component. When I was ten, I began to study with Jascha Brodsky, then in his 80s and no longer performing. A friend of his gave me an audiotape containing Dover Beach for voice and string quartet, recorded in the 1930s. There I heard Samuel Barber's elegant baritone paired with the exquisite violin playing of a youthful Mr. Brodsky, and again the entwining of voice and violin swept me away. For several years after that, at every music festival I attended, I asked if it would be possible to work Dover Beach into the program. And because I had such good experiences with the musicians I met on those occasions, I searched for further repertoire involving singers. 

That search brought me back to Bach. In my late teens, when I had a chance to play one of Bach's arias for violin and voice at the Marlboro Music Festival, I found the interplay of lines as thrilling as it had been when I was a child of four - with the added pleasure of being able to understand the words. And as I learned other arias of Bach, I grew increasingly attached to the repertoire, until finally I proposed the present recording.
 That this project has come to fulfillment - and with such superb colleagues - is for me a dream come true. These magnificent pieces go to the heart of Bach's artistry as a composer of polyphony: multiple voices, at once clean and complex, presenting layer beneath layer for discovery. No matter how many times I play this music, I am always surprised to find in it new intricacies, new touches of beauty. I hope the same proves true for all who hear this album. (Hilary Hahn 10/2009)