Hillary Hahn - Violin Concerto; Vaugh Williams - The Lark AscendingHillary Hahn - Violin Concerto; Vaugh Williams - The Lark Ascending
Kenneth LaFave
The Arizona Republic
Oct. 24, 2004 12:00 AM
Violinist Hilary Hahn is one of very few classical superstars today. Such people used to be legion. There were pianists and violinists and conductors whose next Beethoven series or Baroque exploration audiences awaited with the eagerness of a child anticipating Christmas. Their numbers dwindled with the coming of the digital age. Hahn is one of maybe half a dozen. Tracking her adventures through the repertoire is half the fun. She began at age 17 with, of all things, a stellar disc of unaccompanied J.S. Bach, music generally reserved for artists much older. She then moved on to concertos of Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Bach, Barber, Bernstein, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and Edgar Meyer. Her popularity now is such that she has become the target of sniping as well as praise. "Another Hilary Hahn CD" can be overheard inflected with admiration - or sarcasm. Hahn’s latest release on Deutsche Grammophon, which is also our Arizona Republic-KBAQ Classical CD of the Week, finds the now-24-year-old playing music from England of about a century ago. It features Edward Elgar’s Violin Concerto, a work always on the edge of being accepted the equal of Mendelssohn and company. If anyone can make a case for this 50-minute score, which wears pastoral English lyricism on its sleeve, it is Hahn, who not only owns unerring pitch and spun-silver sound, but knows how to make meaningful phrases from the simplest assortment of notes. I don’t think she does it -quite- but it’s not her fault. In 1910, age 53, Elgar had never before composed a concerto, and it seems to this writer that he didn’t know how. What he came up with resembles, in most passages, a kind of symphony with solo obbligato, in which the orchestra carries the substance of the music while the soloist comments on it. Exceptional passages include the final minutes of the outer movements, where the solo violin takes off in virtuoso splendor, and a reflective cadenza near the close of the finale. Ten years after he wrote this piece, Elgar figured out how to make concerto form fit his talent, and the result was his vastly superior Cello Concerto.
So, why is this CD our weekly pick? Because that is what being a soloist is all about: exploring territory, some of it more traveled than others, to see what diamonds you may find lying on the ground. Hahn finds many, scattered though they are between fields of English green. She and Sir Colin Davis, leading the London Symphony Orchestra, turn the middle movement, a placid Andante, into a mini-tone poem. Davis and Hahn shape one passage near the center into a peak, a watershed on which the rest of the music falls this way or that. Also included is the best-known English piece for violin and orchestra, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending. Hahn takes a songlike approach, bringing a rich cantabile sound to a work usually mined for its color. Reach the critic at (602) 444-8927
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