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Violinist Hilary Hahn, recently named Gramophone magazine's Artist of the Year, is a two-time Grammy Award-winning soloist celebrated for her probing interpretations, technical assurance and compelling stage presence. For a decade and a half, extensive international performances and recording activities have made Hahn one of the most sought-after artists of this era.
Hahn appears regularly with the world's leading orchestras and in the most prestigious recital series in Europe, Asia, and North and South America. In the 2009-10 season, she tours the United States, New Zealand, Japan, Germany, England, France, Austria, Luxembourg, Serbia, and Iceland, and performs as a guest soloist with, among others, the Boston, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Dallas, and Nashville symphonies, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. In a special project this season, Hahn joins baritone Matthias Goerne, soprano Christine Schäfer and the Munich Chamber Orchestra for a series of European concerts featuring arias from their album Bach: Violin and Voice, which was released by Deutsche Grammophon in January 2010.
In the dozen years since she began recording, Hahn has released eleven solo albums on the Deutsche Grammophon and Sony labels, in addition to three live performance DVDs, an Oscar-nominated movie soundtrack, and various compilations. Covering a repertoire as diverse as Bach, Stravinsky, Elgar, Beethoven, Vaughan Williams, Mozart, Schoenberg, Paganini, Spohr, Barber, Bernstein, Korngold, and others, her recordings have received every critical prize in the international press and have been met with equal popular success, with each collection spending weeks on Billboard's Classical Albums Top Ten list.
Hahn's 2008 recording which paired the violin concertos of Schoenberg and Sibelius debuted at Number One and subsequently spent twenty-three weeks on the Billboard classical chart. The album brought Hahn her second Grammy: the 2009 Award for Best Instrumental Soloist Performance with Orchestra. Her first Grammy win came in 2003 for her Brahms and Stravinsky concerto album. At the age of 18, she had received her first Grammy nomination for her recording of the concertos of Beethoven and Bernstein.
Hahn's first release on DVD was a live recording of Mozart's Concerto 4 in Royal Albert Hall, in the millennial concert of the Last Night of the Proms in London in 2000. At age 27, she was the subject of Hilary Hahn: A Portrait, a full-length documentary that included with its interviews and other features a complete live performance of the Korngold violin concerto. In April 2007, as soloist in Pope Benedict XVI's 80th birthday celebration at the Vatican, she played Mozart's Concerto 3 in a concert subsequently released as a live performance DVD by Deutsche Grammophon.
While primarily a classical musician, Hahn participates in a number of other projects and collaborations. In 2004, she was the violin soloist on the Oscar-nominated soundtrack to M. Night Shyamalan's film The Village, and in 2005 and 2006, she appeared as a guest on albums by the art-rock band ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead. More recently, she wrote and performed violin tracks for singer/songwriter Tom Brosseau's record Grand Forks. Hahn works frequently with folk-based singer/songwriter Josh Ritter; they have toured together in Canada, Europe, the United States, and Japan.
Hahn is also active on the contemporary classical music scene. In 1999, she premiered and recorded the violin concerto written for her by the American bassist and composer Edgar Meyer, and in 2009 she did the same with Jennifer Higdon's violin concerto, also written for her. A recording of the Higdon concerto will be released on Deustche Grammophon in fall 2010 alongside the Tchaikovsky concerto. In coming seasons, Hahn will commission, perform, and record an album of pieces by prominent living composers.
Hahn has received numerous international distinctions throughout her career, including – to name a few – multiple Diapason "d'Or of the Year" and "Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik" (German Record Critics' Award) prizes, the 2008 Classical FM/Gramophone Artist of the Year, the Cannes Classical Award, the ECHO Klassik Artist of the Year and other ECHO awards. She has appeared on the covers of all major classical music publications and has been featured in mainstream periodicals such as Vogue, Elle, Town and Country, and Marie Claire. In 2001, Hahn was named "America's Best Young Classical Musician" by Time Magazine.
Hilary Hahn was born in Lexington, Virginia in 1979. At the age of three, she moved to Baltimore, where she began playing the violin one month before her fourth birthday in the Suzuki program of the Peabody Conservatory. For the next five years, Hahn studied in Baltimore with Klara Berkovich, a native of Odessa who taught for 25 years at the Leningrad School for the Musically Gifted. From 10 to 17, she studied at The Curtis Institute of Music with the legendary Jascha Brodsky — the last surviving student of the great Belgian violinist Eugene Ysaÿe — working closely with him until his death at age 89. When Hahn completed her university degree requirements at 16, she deferred graduation and remained at Curtis for several more years, taking additional elective courses in languages, literature, writing, and drama; studying chamber music with Felix Galimir and pianist Gary Graffman; and coaching regularly, after Mr. Brodsky's death, with violinist Jaime Laredo.
Hahn's major orchestral debut came in 1991, the year after she entered Curtis. Her international debut followed at age 14 in Hungary, playing Bernstein with Ivan Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra. In March 1995, at age 15, she made her German debut, playing the Beethoven concerto with Lorin Maazel and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in a concert broadcast on radio and television throughout Europe. Two months later, she received the Avery Fisher Career Grant in New York. For several summers in her teens she attended the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont, and in 1996 she made her Carnegie Hall debut as soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra.
An entertaining and enthusiastic writer, Hahn keeps a journal of her professional travels here on her website, maintains a presence on Twitter, and produces a YouTube channel. She also serves as guest interviewer for the contemporary classical music blog Sequenza21.
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