Hilary Hahn: Entering the Sublime
There is no violinist in the world today quite like Hilary Hahn. She is widely regarded as one of the most essential, daring, and intense artists of our time. Her Bach has been hailed as thrilling, incendiary, and one of the wonders of the Western world. A restlessly curious musician, she champions contemporary composers and opens herself up to other genres of music, pushing the boundaries of performing, and challenging her own classical identity.
She started playing the violin when she was almost four. She went from “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” to Bach in a few months. By the age of five, she was studying with the eminent pedagogue, Klara Berkovich, at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Hahn’s hometown. She learned as many pieces in one year as a music student would normally accomplish in five. At the ripe old age of ten, she auditioned for the famous violin teacher, Jascha Brodsky, at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. He said this of her audition: “She performed with perfect intonation, and so musically I was flabbergasted. It was the only time in my life I said, ‘I want that girl!’”
At eleven, she gave her first concert as a soloist with a major symphony orchestra. At seventeen, she recorded three of Bach’s six sonatas and partitas, the touchstone of the violinist’s repertoire and the measure by which soloists and composers alike measure themselves. The recording was prodigious and established the teenager as an international star and a musical genius of the highest order. In 2018, some twenty years later, and in the midst of one of the most exciting of all classical careers, Hahn recorded the remaining three sonatas and partitas by Bach to complete the set. Hilary Hahn Plays Bach (Sonatas 1 & 2, Partita 1) is, yes, older and wiser, displaying a more spacious, introspective, and emotionally fearless artist. The long-awaited CD was met with massive audience and critical acclaim. It shot to #1 on the classical music charts.
I held one of the coveted tickets to Hilary Hahn’s solo Bach recital at Lincoln Center in the fall of 2018. The stage door opened and the star appeared—graceful, elegant, centered as a ballerina. As she began to play her gorgeous instrument, an 1865 Vuillaume, she sent out a voluminous sound that washed over the rapt audience with immense power, dynamic control, dazzling beauty, and purity. It was the kind of music you only hear in your dreams. I could hardly believe my ears. The audience agreed. The standing ovation she received
