'I don't try to impose myself on a piece, I want to interpret it,' acclaimed young violinist Hilary Hahn tells Eileen Battersby.
Humour, curiosity and natural intelligence as much as her soaring musical gift appear to have shaped the young US virtuoso, Hilary Hahn, who appears tonight at the National Concert Hall in Dublin. In performance, she is the complete violinist: energetic, subtle, lyrical, with a beguiling sweetness of tone. She is lucidly engaged rather than driven, emotionally vivid, but never flashy.
There is intensity and an alluring sense of drama as well as patrician grace to her playing, but essential to the magic is her love of the music. "I don't try to impose myself on a piece, I want to interpret it. I'm the middle man," Hahn says. She is committed to communicating with her audiences. "I want to do everything I can to make people, especially people of my generation, more aware of how great classical music is." She has deliberately avoided specialisation. "I don't want to become associated with one specific composer, and you know, I'm not a scholar, I don't look at things the way an academic would. I have to learn to play a piece before I start to study around it. And I think a lot of music scholars and theorists do really important work but don't get the recognition they deserve."
As campaigners go, she is persuasive without being a zealot and is open to all music. Trained in Baltimore from the age of five by great European teachers such as Odessa-born Klara Berkovich (who taught for 25 years at the Leningrad School for the Musically Gifted before coming to the US), and at the famous Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia from age 10 by the great old world master, Jascha Brodsky (himself a student of Eugene Ysaye), she looks to violinists of an earlier generation such as Kreisler and Heifetz as well as Mischa Elman, Nathan Milstein and Efrem Zimbalist - all of whom Brodsky, who taught her for seven years almost up until his death at the age of 89, knew as friends.
Just as Samuel Barber's beautiful violin concerto (which she recorded along with a hybrid, almost folksy, polyrhythmic contemporary work by US composer Edgar Meyer) is wholly American and yet aware of its European influences, Hahn shares that duality. She is an American interested in, but not obsessed with, Europe.
Barber's romantic concerto has special meaning for her. In a Gramophone magazine interview in 2000, she offered a characteristically perceptive opinion of the concerto, referring to its undercurrent of melancholy.
"It was written before the war [ the first World War] and there are definitely those undertones in it. There's a bit of desperation in the happiness." Barber studied and taught at the Curtis: he and Brodsky were close and although Hahn had prepared the piece for her teacher, Brodsky died before she got to study it with him. "That Curtis/Barber connection means a lot to me," she says.
Every article to date written about Hahn, every review, invariably mentions her youth. She is still only 24, but has already accomplished what many musicians can only aspire to in the course of a long career. She has performed with the great orchestras of the world and posted a number of benchmark performances, such as her debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra aged 13, her Carnegie Hall Concerto debut at 16 - and made outstanding recordings - including her debut at 17 of unaccompanied Bach, the Second and Third Partitas and the Third Sonata (the last named of which features in her Dublin programme). A breathtaking pairing of the Brahms and Stravinsky violin concertos under Sir Neville Mariner and the orchestra of The Academy of St Martin in the Field, won Hahn a Grammy. Hailed "America's Best" young classical musician in 2001 by Time magazine, she is mature in terms of musical achievement and experience. She seems to have mastered timelessness and retains the freshness of a teenager.
The only child of music-loving, non-musician parents who she describes as "hands on" she is funny, confident and likeable, agreeing that playing the violin is very physical "and it can be tiring. You have to be fit". She has a rowing shell, enjoys the notion of sculling on water, although to date seems to have done more of it dry for fitness, a trick she picked up from her former librarian/journalist father who had given up his job and moved from Baltimore to Philadelphia when she enrolled at the Curtis.
Here is a prodigy who denies being one. "It's all happened in stages, so every time something great has happened, I've kind of been ready for it, because it's been gradual."
Unlike many conservatories, the Curtis appears to produce fully rounded graduates rather than competitive specialists. Her liberal arts education was not wasted on her and she delayed taking her degree although she had completed the music part of it at 16. "I got the chance to do lots of things, take lots of courses, the history of Western civilisation, during which we did about a million years in a week, and later courses on the American civil war, literature, poetry writing workshops, fiction writing workshops, acting, dancing for opera. It was great. I was never pushed. I just do it. And I guess I believe, I've always believed, that if you can do something well, you can go all the way with it." She began learning the violin shortly before her fourth birthday and remembers at three seeing a small boy playing one. "I know I must have thought 'Hey, I'd like to do that'." Anyone familiar with her performances and recordings would be justified in expecting a poised, sophisticated veteran of international travel, long wearied by endless variations of the same inane questions.
Instead, Hahn is a delight, personifying America at its best: friendly, normal and very happy with the way she and her violin are seeing the world. She smiles when I call her a troubadour, just her and her violin - in her case, literally in her case, an 1864 Vuillaume which she has been playing since she was 13.
"The travelling, the performing, working in all these interesting places, it's a great way of life." So much so that she maintains a travel journal on her website www.hilary hahn.com. The only regret is not having a dog, or a horse, but then, as she says, "I just sold my apartment so I don't even have a home of my own but my parents have a house in Baltimore, so that's OK."
Her answers are both thoughtful and spontaneous. The virtuoso is still a young girl whose ambition is a good one, that of exploring the repertoire and "not leaving anything unplayed by the end of my career". That career has been carefully planned upon a shrewdly sensible central thesis. Neither Hahn's parents nor her handlers ever wanted to push her or to exploit her youth or appeal. Burn-out will not be a problem, as she wants to enjoy a normal life and also plays chamber music.As we sit in a small room in the National Concert Hall in which a CD player has been set up in order to listen to Hahn's new recording of Elgar's Violin Concerto and Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending, we both remark on cue that there's no window and venture out to the natural light.
Tonight's programme includes Fauré, two Mozart sonatas which she will record later this year, and most majestically, Bach's Sonata No 3 for Solo Violin. It is a piece that demands true artistry to express its lyric warmth and Hahn performed it brilliantly in 1998 when making her UK recital debut. "I played it at my grandparents' funeral. There's a lot of emotion in it and I feel the third is very special," says Hahn, who learnt early in life from Mr Brodsky, that Bach is the ultimate test in complete playing. She may dislike the specialist label, but Hahn's Bach playing is superlative possibly because it showcases her abiding qualities: technique and musicality.
It brings to mind a comparison with another gifted violinist, Nigel Kennedy. No longer the enfant terrible, Kennedy is now approaching 48, and is, unbelievably, almost twice Hahn's age. Eccentric he maybe but as a violinist, he has a lot in common with Hahn, particularly that elusive blend of musicality and technical artistry.
Far from being shocked, she sits up straight and mentions how she was struck by how different a piece sounded when she heard him. "Then I realised, he was playing all the notes, exactly as the piece was written. He is very respectful of the music. I think that it important to play the piece that was written rather than change it to suit yourself." How difficult is it though, playing works that are so well known? "It's like being an actor. You can give five people the same sentence and they'll all say it five different ways." Kennedy has also recorded the same pairing of Elgar and Vaughan Williams.
Her first encounter with Elgar's Violin Concerto was when driving in the car with her father. "It's the kind of piece you always seem to come in on half way through." As for the Vaughan Williams, an elegiac celebration of beauty which she plays with thoughtful grace, she says, "It's my Mom's favourite work".
Her new recording, dedicated to her parents, includes a brief, insightful note. "These works" she writes, "present humanity and nature, human nature..." True of the pieces, it is equally true of her playing.
Hilary Hahn and recital partner Natalie Zhu (piano) perform the opening concert in the NCH/The Irish Times Celebrity Concert Series tonight at the National Concert Hall, Dublin
