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SFist Interviews Hilary Hahn
Hilary Hahn has been a celebrated violinist for so long, you'd forget she hasn't even turned 30! We (as in our favorite philistine) caught her last time around when she was playing the Korngold violin concerto, and loved her. She's back in a more familiar piece, the Tchaikovsky concerto in D major, starting tomorrow night. How's that for some perfectly festive holidays!
We got the chance to phone Hilary, and well, that Tchaikovsky concerto, what's up with it? Actually, I just recorded it, she said. It will be a while before it comes out, but I spent a lot of time with this piece this fall. It's a combination of styles. People say it's a very romantic piece, but it has a lot of classical elements. It has subtle aspects to it that are fun to explore...It's not heart-rending, loud bombastic stuff, there are a lot of beautiful melodies. A lot of people, when they think of this concerto, they think of a hugely romantic work, in all ways. I hear a lot of layers to it, other than this one impression you might get. There is a lot more under the surface. And if you focus only on one part of it, you miss out on a lot of subtelties and structural elements, and that's what I try to bring out when I play...It will be a very responsive orchestra for it. I play the piece as it's written, I don't take any cut, I play all the orginal notes. It's a slightly different way of doing it, so it's great to have a flexible orchestra. Yep, top 13 orchestra in the world!
We are kinda sad we missed her in the Korngold, since we like to hear stuff we don't know. A lot of repertoire choices are not the necessarily the artist's choices. I wanted to play Tchaikovsky in San Francisco. But there are places where I want to play a lot of different pieces, and I've been asked to play Beethoven or Brahms.
There's a tour I've been trying to organize in Europe in a couple years, and I've proposed five different concerti, and the tour organizers are scared to present those pieces, and I've been asked basically to play either Beethoven or Brahms. They did not want Sibelius, they did not want Mozart (here, our jaw drops), they didn't want Barber, they did not want Prokofiev. Those are weird times right now, and you'll see a lot more standard repertoire in a future as people are afraid of ticket sales. I don't know if it's the right response. But I'm not in there seeing what affect sales. I have to believe them when they say it's important to them.
The only time I get frustrated with that, when it's a certain country and I'm never given pieces in a certain country, and I don't get to play pieces that are integral to my repertoire. I don't feel they know me as an artist. Which country, we asked? But she punted: It's changing, in the past, it's been Asia. We'll see, I guess.
We looked up a few of her CDs, and we found the pairings interesting. Brahms with Stravinsky, Mendelssohn with Shostakovitch, Schoenberg and Sibelius. What will she pair the Tchaikovsky with? The other piece is a violin concerto. It's a world premiere, well, it won't be a world premiere, it will be premiered in February, it's a Jennifer Higdon piece. We'll record it in May, it will be a while before it comes out. Sounds cool, how did she match those two concertos together?
I have kinda run out of a lot of big pieces, she says, giggling. I have already recorded most of the things that people think of as popular concerti. The Tchaikovsky, actually, I haven't done that since I was a student at Curtis. And last season, I started to play it again. When I booked the recording, the Higdon had not been written yet. I knew that I was working on the Higdon, and I wanted to record it. And rediscovering Tchaikovsky gave me a different perspective on it that I had before, and I wanted to record that. To me, both pieces go back to my student years, because Jennifer Higdon was my 20th century music history teacher...She was responsible for exposing me to a lot of music that I was not familiar with and for my overall outlook on music written in the past century. That, along with my memory of working on the Tchaikovsky with my teacher, kinda tied them together in a sentimental way. Also, the Tchaikovsky needs something strong to stand with it. Jennifer's music has a lot of personality, and it is very strong. Not strong in a loud obnoxious way, but strong in a sense that it has lots of character, and it does not really beat around the bush. I thought those two would go together well. I didn't want the pieces to overshadow each other. Something instinctively told me that they would go well together.
We were curious about her violin, since it's a replica of a Guarneri (that of Paganini), made in the 19th century. Wouldn't a bank, or whoever else owns a Strad, let her use theirs?
I've had this violin since I was 14. It's a great instrument by Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume, he is considered to be one of the premier French makers. I won't say the best cause I'm biased, I'll leave that for an expert to judge. When you find the right instrument for yourself, there is no point in continuing to look around and try things. When you pick up a new violin, you have to learn how to play it. There's always a transition process. You don't know a violin until you've played it for a couple years. I'd rather stay on the same trajectory with my instrument. I haven't missed anything in my instrument. If it's not broken, why fix it?
But would she ask SF Symphony Concertmaster Sasha Barantschik to play his real, not imitation, $6 million Guarneri (which, it turns out, used to be owned by Vuillaume!) Do you do that with your friend's partner? She replies, and we were dumbstruck. There you have it! An instrument is a particular thing, it's a partner. If someone wants me to play their instrument, if they want to hear it in the hall, then I'll do it. When you play an instrument, you don't hear it from a distance, so that's an interesting thing to do.
What I like playing on, if I'm surrounded by other instruments, I like to play modern instruments. Modern instruments have to be played enough to bring out their personality. A violin has to be played a certain amount in order to vibrate right. You have to give it a chance. You have to play on it and bring it out, and it will sound magnificent. In a brand new instrument, you can hear it in one hour, you can start hearing the difference...With older instruments, I find them interesting, but I don't feel the need to play them just to play them. ...I don't believe because the violin is famous you have to play it.
She writes a journal at her web page. The last few entries we checked were about travel annoyances. When travel issues are happening, that's what I write about. I write about everything. Recently there's been a lot of travel issues. I write about lot of stuff, like the recording process, about working with other people, I write about what it's like to be on the road, different experiences I have in different cities, local experiences that I happen to stumbled across, I write about that.
I write about the experience about the musician on the road. In my case, I like to let the music speak for itself. There is not much I can add to what the people already know about the music that will be terribly enlightening. I am not a musicologist type, I don't base my interpretation on the history of a certain piece, I don't have this encyclopedic reference to draw on. I prefer to look at the music for the music. There are lot of people I can talk to get information, and I do, I am very well informed by the time I show up for a concert. But I feel I'm only getting one side of the story when I'm learning about what people have written about a piece, or what a composer has written about it, or the anecdotes that happened in a composer's life around that time.
That's very interesting information, very useful for an audience or for a performer. But the music speaks plenty. You can enjoy that music a lot without that information. But without the music, you cannot enjoy the music. I can offer a very good source in myself for people curious to know what's behind the scene as a performer.
You can chat with Hilary too! She assured us that, while she does not take comment on her website, she makes every effort to meet and greet audiences after the show. Indeed, she'll do two signings and one "Off the podium" Q&A, alongside conductor James Gaffigan. And we all know how entertaining James is for those!