30-year-old violinist Hilary Hahn has been a classical music superstar for nearly half her life; her first recording (of Bach's solo partitas) was released when she was just 18 years old.
Though it would be easy enough for a musician of such skill and renown to rest comfortably within the confines of the standard repertoire, Hahn wouldn't be happy there. That sense of intellectual curiosity and engagement led her back to an old friend, Jennifer Higdon, who wrote a new concerto for her--one that went on to win the 2010 Pulitzer Prize. Ariama's editor, Anastasia Tsioulcas, spoke to the violinist about her pairing the Higdon with an uber-classic, the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, and how her own life story connects these two seemingly dissimilar works.
AT: How did you originally meet Jennifer Higdon?
HH: Jennifer was my 20th-century music professor at Curtis when I was sixteen. She was so great, and so open as a teacher. Over the year, we usually focused on one composer per class meeting, and what we did for the most part would be just to listen together in class to all this amazing music. It was an overview that I hadn’t had before—I’d been at Curtis since I was ten years old, but I hadn’t had a lot of exposure to 20th-century music. So it’s pretty cool that she introduced me to the music of the 20th century, and now here she is, a 21st-century composer, writing a concerto for me.
AT: I think that her orchestral writing is very special, and as a listener I think that she’s brought a similar energy and ethos to this concerto.
HH: I’d agree. There’s a lot of amazing, almost chamber-music like passages in this concerto, lots of duos, trios, and quartets. And her sense of color, and of how to draw very different colors out of the instruments, is unbelievable, like in the percussion entrance in the first movement. Not only did Jennifer ask the percussionist to play with knitting needles, but she wound up specifying exactly what size needles were needed to get precisely the color she was after.
The Violin Concerto is very soloistic for the orchestra players, too. It’s actually a difficult piece for a player—there’s so much going on in any given moment that you have to just relax and go with the internal pulse of the piece.
AT: This piece won a Pulitzer Prize. What’s your response to the very warm reception this concerto has received?
HH: It’s funny—every time I think to myself 'okay, the initial wave of interest in this piece is slowing down,’ we’re deluged by more requests from other people wanting to present it. That’s great; the idea was that we really wanted to get it out there and have it take on a life of its own, which is sometimes hard to do with a new piece of music. To me, one of the most important aspects of making this recording is not just to give another avenue for this piece to be heard, but also to give other musicians a reference point for when they perform it.
AT: And you have a long history with the Tchaikovsky.
HH: Yes, and weirdly that piece has a real Curtis component for me, too. I learned the Tchaikovsky concerto as a teenager and studied it with my teacher, Jascha Brodsky, so somehow these two composers, Tchaikovsky and Higdon, are all bound up together in Curtis memories for me.
Anyway, then I put it down the Tchaikovsky for what was going to be a little while—and somehow a little while turned into ten years! And because I had such a clean, long break that when I came back to this piece, I didn’t have certain habits or mindset associated with it. I could approach it as a reset more than as a developing evolution.
***
Hilary Hahn recommends a couple of her desert-island discs to Ariama:
I love, love all those recordings with Leon Fleisher and George Szell, like of the Brahms’ concertos: http://www.ariama.com/albums/leon-fleisher-plays-brahms-%28leon-fleisher-sony-1997%29
Isaac Stern playing Prokofiev’s Concerto No. 2 is just unbelievable: http://www.ariama.com/albums/prokofiev-violin-concertos-nos-1-2-%28isaac-stern-cbs-1983%29
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by Anastasia Tsioulcas
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