Hilary Hahn / Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France / Mikko Franck PARIS

 

PARIS

Hilary Hahn VIRTUOSO

 

VIRTUOSO

 

Hilary Hahn ANTÓN GARCÍA ABRIL 6 Partitas

Following the widely celebrated release of Hilary Hahn Plays Bach on Decca Classics last fall, Hilary Hahn returns with a world premiere recording of Antón García Abril’s 6 Partitas, commissioned by Hahn for solo violin—her first-ever solo commission and her first of a set of pieces from a single composer. Each movement has a different theme, displays its own personality, and is deeply tied to the performer for whom the work was written—so much so that García Abril chose to name the movements after Hahn in acrostic: HEART, IMMENSITY, LOVE, ART, REFLECTIVE, YOU.

There is a longstanding tradition of great composers writing six polyphonic works for the violin. Perhaps due to the creativity that arises when a composer is limited to a single unaccompanied instrument, and the challenge of creating a set of diverse but cohesive material within that framework, these pieces rank amongst the most iconic, progressive compositions in the repertoire. Hahn commissioned these 6 Partitas from García Abril both to continue this tradition as well as to amplify this important contemporary composer outside of his home country. Likewise, García Abril found inspiration in Hahn’s technical proficiency and interpretational skill, writing her personality and mastery of the violin into the music itself.

“This commission led me to an enthusiastic and long-meditated work,” said García Abril. “I had the great fortune to compose them directly with Hilary… [her] generosity and interest in the work makes her one of the all-time greats, unique and powerful—not only artistically but at the same time intellectually, placing her in a higher musical state.”

Hilary Hahn plays BACH Sonatas 1 & 2 - Partita 1

When Hahn’s Plays Bach came out on Sony in 1997, critics were astounded that a performer would choose solo Bach for her debut album; they were further confounded by her elegant approach to this music’s technical and interpretive challenges at such a young age. Bach expert Nicholas Anderson wrote in BBC Music Magazine at the time, “Bach’s six unaccompanied solos - three each of partitas and sonatas - have long been regarded as the pinnacle of violin writing and the most elusive of goals for the aspiring performer... Hahn's affection for Bach's music becomes apparent at almost every turn; and the concluding movement of the C major Sonata is a tour de force. I long to hear more.” Stereo Review wrote, “I would go so far as to say that I've never heard this legendary, impossible piece of music played on a higher level, technically and musically, than it is on Hahn's debut CD. This is simply a magnificent performance, completely true in all its parts and possessed of a depth and wisdom that belie the performer's age. Unlike most of the violinists who play this music, she is truly its master, and that frees her to play it with soul.”

“Not a week has passed since then without an audience member asking me when I’ll record the rest of the set,” Hahn says, having released her first album, Hilary Hahn Plays Bach, when she was 17 to great critical and popular success. Now 38, she completes her recording of the Bach sonatas and partitas for solo violin in an album that will be released on Decca Classics on October 5, 2018. The new album includes the first partita and first and second sonatas.

Hahn’s relationship with Bach goes back to her earliest studies of the violin, which included practicing or performing one movement of the sonatas or partitas every day. She continues to work on solo Bach nearly every day, also programming a sonata or partita in many recitals, offering movements as encores after concertos, and presenting Bach in her spontaneous “mini concerts” for babies and their parents, knitting circles, and yoga studios. Most of all, she continues to love the music and to turn to it as a source of both reflection and challenge.

“You can’t get away with anything in Bach,” Hahn explained in a Gramophone magazine cover story in 2000. “You can’t focus on the technique and forget about the phrasing, and you can’t focus on the phrasing and forget the technique because neither will work. You also have to balance voices. It’s a challenge to phrase each voice individually, to play everything the way it should be played technically and make the multiple voices sound like one piece. It’s takes a lot of thought and a lot of playing to get to where you can feel comfortable with it.”

Just as Hahn knew that her first album should be Bach, despite skepticism from more experienced people in the music industry, she also knew that now was the moment to record the rest of the set. She explains, “What you hear in this completion of my solo Bach set is therefore the best recording that I feel I can offer at this point in my life. I love these pieces. Indulging in the freedom of the moment is the only way to attain an honest performance, and the moments and grand gestures that Bach gifted violinists through these works are magically infinite.” She adds, “I used to envision this recording as my link to a long chain of traditions. But now that this album is finished, I see that the best way to honor the continuum that Bach’s solo violin works embody is to simply appreciate these pieces when they are needed — whatever that means to you. Whether you experience the sonatas and partitas as a violinist or a listener, alone or in community with others, I hope that they will bring the depth, emotion, humor, and reverie to your life that they do to mine.”
Booklet

Hilary Hahn RETROSPECTIVE

On January 19, Hilary Hahn releases Retrospective, an album showcasing all of her recordings for Deutsche Grammophon, along with new, unedited live performance recordings, which provide the full immediacy of the concert experience.

The collection includes at least one track from each of her 12 Deutsche Grammophon albums and live recordings from Hahn's Meistersaal concert in Berlin, an event especially dedicated to her fans. The recording includes the live performance of Mozart's Sonata KV 379, in addition to Max Richter's “Mercy” and Tina Davidson's “Blue Curve of the Earth,” with pianist Cory Smythe, from In 27 Pieces: the Hilary Hahn Encores.  

Hahn made her first record at the age of 17: Hilary Hahn Plays Bach. She has gone on to release sixteen more albums on Deutsche Grammophon and Sony, in addition to an Oscar-nominated movie soundtrack and an award-winning recording for children, and win three Grammy awards. This latest release Retrospective references Hahn’s latest decade and a half of recording activity, from age 23 to the current day. 

For many years, Hahn has received unsolicited works of art from fans of all ages at concerts, which she features on her website and social media. To include her fans in this retrospective and acknowledge their longtime presence in her career, Hahn decided to use fan art for both the cover and the internal booklet. She chose pieces by professional and amateur artists in Turkey, Switzerland, Canada, and the U.S., and the artists will be compensated for the use of their work.

Christine Fraser, who drew the cover art says, “Fan art seems like a way to honor a person and to visually say, 'thank-you.' In Hilary's case, she has provided me with such a wonderful array of music that I frequently listen to while drawing or painting, I wanted to show her my appreciation by creating something to convey that message. For me, it's exciting to see an artistic exchange like this, as music has always been a huge influence in my own creative process. I am both honored and inspired by this opportunity and it is an incredible feeling to be part of a collaboration that includes artists of different age groups, with different styles, and from various locations around the world.” 

Hilary Hahn / Esa-Pekka Salonen / Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra SCHOENBERG - SIBELIUS Violin Concertos

Some years ago RCA's ace producer Jack Pfeiffer told me how, every now and again, Jascha Heifetz would open the score of Schoenberg's Concerto only to close it again with a perplexed shrug. Years earlier Schoenberg had personally sent Heifetz the score and the reaction was much the same. Heifetz just didn't get it, but he did at least try. What I wonder would he have made of this magnificent recording by Hilary Hahn? When the last chord sounds its full stop, the sense of satisfied finality is exhilarating. Hahn has the full of measure of the piece, its gawky lyricism, ethereal filigree and cripplingly difficult cadenzas (awkward chords galore), all rendered seemingly effortless. Wisps of old-world Vienna echo from the Andante, whereas in a performance of this calibre the finale's complex acrobatics suddenly have musical meaning. Of course having a first-rate orchestra and conductor helps: Esa-Pekka Salonen's direction is in the very best sense of the term “slick”, a perfect example of musical badinage, alert, crystal-clear and superbly recorded. Which makes the CD mandatory listening both for lovers of the work who crave an appreciative performance and for doubters who still await conversion.

The Sibelius performance is fascinating but less wholly convincing although as with the Schoenberg Hahn weaves a seductive, evenly deployed tone and her technique is impeccable. But while in the Schoenberg you sense a palpable level of emotional engagement Hahn's approach to Sibelius is cool, sphinx-like one might say, the first movement's many solo passages broadly drawn but somehow remote. No violinist currently performing makes a lovelier sound and although time and again I would note some illuminating phrase (not to mention Salonen's immaculately groomed accompaniment) the sum effect is of a strangely cold beauty. But the Schoenberg performance is, as I say, magnificent. (Rob Cowan / Gramophone)

Hilary Hahn / Valentina Lisitsa CHARLES IVES Four Sonatas

In addition to fine program notes by our former colleague Robert Kirzinger, Hillary Hahn writes about her and her duo partner’s experiences learning and playing Ives sonatas. In two pages, Hahn says more about learning and performing Ives, and about performing music in general, than I have seen in any book. I would quote her entire essay, except that you are going to buy this disc and so can read it yourself. “A piece of music eventually has to get onstage, in front of audiences, for its performers to see its true colors.” After taking the Third Sonata around the world: “The more we played it for various audiences, the more the details and refinements Ives wrote into his score became ingrained into our musical consciousness, and the freer we became to explore additional expressive possibilities.”
I think of Hahn as a very “classical” artist, although she plays and has recorded everything from J. S. Bach to Jennifer Higdon. Her tone here is very clean and a touch dry, without a drop of romantic syrup—which would not be out of place in Ives’s sonatas. Her playing suggests the word “honesty,” fully appropriate for Ives, the Yankee traditionalist/iconoclast. Kirzinger this time: “Combining the classical tradition of Brahms and Beethoven with the vibrant, self-reliant spirit of an optimistic, growing, still-young United States …” Hahn and Valentina Lisitsa lean toward the masters but do not shortchange the Americanisms; they just make sure that the popular elements do not take over. At first hearing, these performances sound a bit conservative, but they wear well, no doubt for just that reason.
Returning to a favorite set by Gregory Fulkerson and Robert Shannon, we find more emotion, more heart-on-sleeve playing, and it works very well. But Fulkerson’s intonation is inconsistent and his tone runs to edginess. It is Shannon who provides the depth and clarity on that Bridge set; he emerges as more than a full partner. Lisitsa is by no means a cipher; she and Hahn have obviously come to full agreement—they play as one, each taking the lead as the music requires. Fulkerson’s tempi sound just right (well, I am used to them); Hahn is considerably faster in all but one of the 12 movements (a total timing of 66:24 to Fulkerson’s 79:52), and yet her performances never seem rushed. Deutsche Grammophon provides fine sound from Clubhouse, a recording studio in Rhinebeck, New York. While I won’t discard Fulkerson/Shannon, I have no hesitation recommending Hahn/Lisitsa as a first choice for this wonderful music. (Arkiv Music)

Hilary Hahn MOZART 5 - VIEUXTEMPS 4 Violin Concertos

Hilary Hahn’s newest album, Mozart 5, Vieuxtemps 4 – Violin Concertos, is her first recording with The Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen and Paavo Järvi, after performing and touring with the ensemble and conductor for many years. The disc releases on March 31, and is Hahn’s first orchestral offering since her 2010 pairing of Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto and Jennifer Higdon’s Pulitzer-prize winning violin concerto, which was written for Hahn. With this new album, she returns to core violin repertoire, hot on the heels of her critically-acclaimed, Grammy-winning album of 27 commissioned short pieces, In 27 Pieces: the Hilary Hahn Encores, and an improvised recording with prepared pianist Hauschka, titled Silfra.
Mozart 5, Vieuxtemps 4 also brings Hahn full circle, after more than three decades of violin playing, to two concertos that have been part of her repertoire since she was ten years old. Vieuxtemps’s Violin Concerto No. 4 was the last large piece she learned with Klara Berkovich, her teacher from ages five to ten. Several months later, Mozart 5 was the first concerto that Jascha Brodsky taught her at the Curtis Institute of Music. Berkovich began her violin studies in Odessa and went on to teach in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) before emigrating to the States. Brodsky was one of the last pupils of the legendary Eugène Ysaÿe, who, coincidentally, was a star student of Vieuxtemps, making Vieuxtemps Hahn’s musical great-grandfather in the violinist family tree.

Both concertos are part of Hahn’s active performance repertoire, and both were written by composers who were violin virtuosos in their own right. Hahn writes, “It’s fun to delve into [Mozart’s] ingenuity and emotional directness, his writing speaking directly to listeners while performers delight in his myriad clever phrases. As a result, Mozart improves moods; when I look around the stage at people playing his works, I always see smiles.” On this recording, Hahn plays the cadenzas by Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim.

Like Mozart, Vieuxtemps initially learned violin from his father and toured Europe as a prodigy. When he wrote Concerto No. 4, he was living in St. Petersburg, where he was a court violinist to Tsar Nicholas I and taught violin at the Conservatory. “This concerto is operatically lyrical and demands flexibility, panache, focus, a flair for drama, and chamber-music-style unity even in its most symphonic dimensions,” Hahn explains.

Of the collaboration for this album, Hahn writes, “One of my favorite things about working on a piece over many years is the chance to experiment broadly with expression, concepts, and technique — on my own and with my colleagues. When those colleagues have been musical partners for a long time, as is the case with Paavo Järvi and The Deutsche KammerphilharmonieBremen, our shared access to the imaginative aspects of music is immediate and honest. Trying a new idea is as natural as breathing, and challenging each other’s musical inclinations is like conversing with your oldest and closest friends.”

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)

Hilary Hahn plays BACH

I saw this young American violinist from Baltimore playing Mozart’s Fourth Concerto, K218, at a Prom. This was a very good performance but, for me, the finale did not quite come off. And, with respect, it is Mozart’s fault. He keeps changing the tempo. First, 15 bars at andante, then 57 at allegro, 15 at andante, 43 at allegro, 59 at andante, 33 at allegro, 7 at andante and 25 at allegro. This is stop and start music. She was persuaded to play an encore at this Prom and she choose Bach. I was impressed with her Bach and this CD reinforces that first impression.

I was seriously deterred from Bach’s solo violin music because of some really awful performances that I had to endure and from leading professionals. I also determined never to hear it again. But along came Hilary. I adore her Bach playing and in a few years time it will be even better than it is now although I hasten to add it is already really very fine indeed. There is so much to admire and she avoids the mistakes and idiosyncratic quirks that some famous violinists make.

Firstly, she plays the works as music not as studies or showpieces.

Secondly, she is not hindered by authenticity of style. She has not wasted her time, or ours, on ensuring that it is in the style that Bach would have known which, quite frankly, is a stupid pursuit anyhow.

Thirdly, she does not fuss over ornaments but plays them naturally as if they are an integral part of the music. Perhaps they are but so many soloists herald a trill and you know it is coming and then ham it up as if it is an essential theatrical gesture.

Fourthly, she plays the music at sensible and compelling tempi and with few irritating rallentandos. To put this into common parlance she gets on with it and does not labour or linger over stylish features as some do.

Fifthly, she plays with a controlled brilliance and, please forgive me saying so, only a professional musician will understand and appreciate this point.

Sixthly, there are no excesses. The control does not detract from the music and its quality. But here already is a maturity that some violinists three times her age have not yet found. Some never do. Music is communication not demonstration. Music is for both the brain and heart not for ostentation and eccentric personal interpretations. (David Wright)

Hilary Hahn IN 27 PIECES (The Hilary Hahn Encores)

Encores are addictive. Witty, moving, and challenging, they have been offered to enthusiastic audiences by the greatest musicians throughout history. The majority of the encores that we violinists learn today were shaped by the performers who preceded us. Their pieces are our classics. With so many to choose among, you might wonder why I am adding more. Toward the end of the twentieth century, those marvelous old chestnuts enjoyed a revival by way of remastered historical recordings, new albums, and printed collections. Contemporary encores, however, were not featured, nor were they commissioned with any frequency. I was intrigued by the future of the genre and how composers might wish to redefine the form. When I pictured a novel set of favorite miniatures catching on – pieces crafted by today’s minds – the idea of a commissioned-encores project planted itself in my head. The problem was that I had no starting point and couldn’t anticipate where such an undertaking would lead me. “Begin anywhere” is a famous nugget of advice from John Cage. I “began anywhere” multiple times, over the course of several years. One day, it dawned on me that I’d been agonizing over what I was supposed to do, instead of following my instincts. I sat down to revisit contemporary music that had been recommended to me. arked in front of my computer, I looked up each composer and clicked on links to their repertoire, colleagues, and influences. Mesmerized by the wealth of creativity I found, I listened for hours, until the sun started to rise. Uncovering works that I’d never imagined existed was intoxicating. In the months that followed, amply fueled by tea and chocolate, I searched every source I could, devouring sound samples available online. When a piece grabbed me, my breath would catch, and the urge to collaborate with that composer on this project was visceral. Then it was time for the next step. I made more than two dozen nerve-wracking cold calls to composers I hoped would create new encores. It was impossible to predict how anyone would respond. As it turned out, every conversation introduced me to a fascinating person. Twenty-six composers signed on. I gave them two parameters: each piece should be under five minutes and for acoustic violin and piano. (If an interpretation were to stretch a minute here and there, that would be alright.) (Hilary Hhan)