Hilary Hahn with the NZSO - taking time
Violinist Hilary Hahn
Photo credit: Dana van Leeuwen
Hilary Hahn is a musician who values taking time. She believes the arts and music can offer “emotional documentation” of history. “In concerts,” the international star violinist tells me, “I deliberately stay in certain moments in my interpretations to let everyone catch their breath together, feel things, not just forget things.” This thoughtful artist is committed to taking a year-long sabbatical every decade.
When we talk, Hahn is in Seoul on what she describes as a lightning tour of South Korea with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra - three concerts in three cities on three consecutive nights, road travel in between, then rushing back to the airport. Time is important, but she’s living the life of a global performer. “It’s contradictory, isn’t it?” she says wryly.
Less contradictory is the concerto Hahn played in Korea. Prokofiev’s 1st Violin Concerto, also scheduled for concerts in Auckland and Wellington on her upcoming tour with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, has been one of her “signature” works since her teens. Her latest interpretation of it was released last year on her much-praised album, “Paris”, recorded with Mikko Franck and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France.
Hilary Hahn’s latest album Paris
“I think of Prokofiev’s 1st Violin Concerto as a French piece.”
Prokofiev’s concerto premiered in Paris in 1923 and Hahn describes it as a French piece. “It’s also very mercurial, beginning in lyrical stillness but going from heartfelt and delicate to audacious and bombastic in a matter of seconds.” She believes Prokofiev was influenced by his work with the Ballets Russes in Paris, almost choreographing the solo violin part. “It requires the whole body to play it.”
Hahn, now 42 and mother of two young daughters, was initially hailed as a “child prodigy”, a description she’s not fond of. Her earliest violin lessons were before her 4th birthday, through the Suzuki Method in Baltimore, Maryland, where she grew up. She learned then the habit of listening and became used to performing on stage. “It’s really a great method,” she says now.
Aged just 10, she auditioned successfully for the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and studied there for nine years, much of that time the youngest student. She found it a supportive and warm environment. “My classmates looked out for me,” she remembers. “There were college parties and I used to think ‘why am I so unpopular, I never get invited to anything!’ Eventually I realised they were being ‘age appropriate’.”
Students at the Curtis were encouraged to form relationships with audiences and Hahn now has an enormous fan base worldwide. “I’ve always enjoyed meeting audiences,” she says. “I remember a child after a student recital asking me to sign her programme and saying, ‘I’m going to keep this until you’re famous.’” Now very famous indeed, Hahn is still charming to long lines of fans at album signings. Her tongue-in-cheek social media handle @violincase has huge followings on Twitter and Instagram, where she posts curated playlists of her performances with names like ‘Rest’ and ‘Workout’.
Hilary Hahn plays Bach
“…Bach goes with me everywhere.”
Hahn first encountered the music of J S Bach in early Suzuki tunes. “I didn’t even realise who this Bach person was,” she smiles. From childhood she has played from Bach’s solo Sonatas and Partitas almost daily, and deliberately chose that music for her debut album in 1997. Two decades later she completed the set with the second album of Hilary Hahn Plays Bach, rightly acclaimed for its brilliance and depth. “Bach,” she says, “goes with me everywhere. His music reaches people immediately.” In her Seoul concert, she played solo Bach, as she often does, as an encore.
NZSO audiences will also hear Hahn play Brahms’ Violin Concerto, another of her favourites. Her 2001 album, Brahms/Stravinsky: Violin Concertos, won her the first of her three Grammys when she recorded it, aged 21, with Sir Neville Marriner and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. Two decades later, she’s bringing the Brahms back, she says, to her “active sphere” of repertoire, but her approach has changed. Referring to the “global trauma” of the pandemic, she suggests that while Brahms is satisfying to sink your teeth into, it’s not necessary to stay with “all that meatiness and intensity”. She’s enjoying playing around with the lyrical quiet moments. “The beauty of Brahms’ writing is what we choose to express in it. So, I’m reconstructing, keeping a lot of the tradition, but changing the details.”
Violinist Hilary Hahn
“…I can go inside myself.”
Photo credit: Dana van Leeuwen
All three works Hahn will play with the NZSO showcase the expressive beauty of her playing, perhaps more than showy virtuosity. The third Wellington concert features Ernest Chausson’s gorgeous Poème, which opens her “Paris” album. A single movement, Hahn says for her it has “a feeling of impending doom.” Just as his career was blossoming, in part because of the success of Poème, the composer died in his mid-forties.
Comparing it to Vaughan Williams’ soaring The Lark Ascending, Hahn says the beauty of Chausson’s work is in its profundity. “It’s a piece where I can go inside myself. The beauty is how it goes under the surface and plays around with gravity and momentum.”
When Hahn talks about repertoire, it’s clear that, despite the pressures of her international career, she is finding the time to go inside herself and the music. While talking about the Brahms Concerto, she seems to sum up her approach to all her work. “You need a lot of time, and you need really good collaboration and colleagues who are listening to each other and to what you are doing so you can work on it, from the inside out, all over again.” Hahn’s contemplative musicianship, and the many generous ways she shares it, is perhaps her greatest hallmark.
Hilary Hahn with the NZSO, conducted by Gemma New. ‘Truth and Beauty’ Wellington August 4, Auckland August 5
‘Style and Substance’ Wellington August 6, ‘Love Triumphant’ Wellington August 7
More information and tickets here
This artist profile first appeared in the NZ Listener issue July 23, 2022