Carnegie Hall

A captivating violinist known for effortlessly merging fierce intellect with exquisite instinct, Hilary Hahn was already a veteran performer by the time most musicians might still be learning their scales. When she made her Carnegie Hall recital debut in 2002 at 22 years old, she had already logged numerous concerto appearances at the Hall, recorded five albums for Sony Classical, performed alongside many of the world’s most sought-after conductors, been named “America’s Best Young Classical Musician” by TIME, and been nominated for her first Grammy.

“I never felt like a prodigy,” she once told The New York Times. “For one thing, the root of the word is rather monstrous.” (Prodigy comes from Latin for a “bad omen”). “I never really felt like a monster,” she explained, “because I always had a lot of different interests.” This month, we take a closer look at the well-rounded virtuoso, whose performances of J. S. Bach’s violin concertos with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen and recently released full-length documentary Hilary Hahn: Evolution of an Artist are available for premium, on-demand viewing exclusively on Carnegie Hall+. 

Born in 1979 in Lexington, Virginia, Hahn was raised in Baltimore by a journalist-librarian father and a mother who was an accountant. Showing an early—and prodigious—talent for the violin, she entered Philadelphia’s prestigious Curtis Institute of Music at 10 years old. There, she was mentored by legendary violinists Jascha Brodsky and Jaime Laredo, and her professional ascent was swift: She made her major orchestral debut with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra the year she started at Curtis as a late substitute for the ailing violin prodigy Midori, and performed with the New York Philharmonic at 14 with her signature 1864 Vuillaume violin already in her hands.

High-profile engagements with other major orchestra soon followed, including The Cleveland Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, and The Philadelphia Orchestra, with which Hahn made her Carnegie Hall debut on November 26, 1996—just one day before her 17th birthday.

“She has this wonderful simplicity in her playing,” Laredo remarked to the Los Angeles Times when she was still a student. “At the same time, there’s this tremendous intellect. Sometimes when I hear her, I feel as if I’m listening to someone who’s 65 and has had a lifetime of experiences.”

Hahn’s searching intelligence led her first to Bach, whose florid works for solo violin made up Hilary Hahn Plays Bach—her first recording for Sony. Recorded when the artist was just 17, the album offered three of the composer’s six unaccompanied works for violin—an epic body of work that has been subject to countless interpretations since it was composed 300 years ago. Hahn would complete the cycle more than 20 years later with a second recording of Bach’s works, bringing her maturing perspective to a composer she reveres.

“For me, this recording is sort of an arc,” she said in an interview about the new album. “When I recorded the first album, I was in a different place in my life: I was still a student, and I was still getting used to the recording process ... Whereas I normally see a recording as a portrait of that particular day, I see this one as a representation of where I’ve arrived after this time with Bach.”

Over the years, as a great many violinists set their sights—and bows—on Bach, interpretive approaches have swung in and out of fashion. Reviewing Hahn’s first-ever violin-alone recital in Manhattan, The New York Times was dazzled by the paradoxical freshness of her more old-fashioned style. “What most surprised me about Ms. Hahn’s take on Bach—she performed the first sonata and the first two partitas—was its throwback glamor,” they reported. While her slower movements took on “an unabashedly Romantic approach, with slow tempos that allow her to spin out the melody in shiny ribbons,” the work’s faster movements were dispatched with “such fire and panache that the audience erupted in spontaneous (and graciously acknowledged) applause ... With sure dramatic instinct she zoomed in on moments of pathos, lingering on a sighing motif, or building up crescendos with muscular impatience.”

Carnegie Hall+ subscribers can experience this electricity for themselves via a 2019 transmission of Bach’s Violin Concertos from the Gstaad Menuhin Festival. Appearing alongside the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen and conductor Omer Meir Wellber, Hahn is at her communicative best, dispatching elegant and pristine lines in the slow movements and the requisite bravura wherever Bach calls for speed.

Although adept in the classics, Hahn is far from staid or old-fashioned. Her social media savviness has manifested in a large online following and the birth of the #100daysofpractice challenge, which provides worldwide audiences with a look into how professional musicians continually improve their craft and encourages musicians of all ages to document their progress. The hashtag has been used more than 800,000 times on Instagram alone.

Many of her 16 albums on the Deutsche Grammophon and Sony labels (three of which have won Grammy Awards) are devoted to innovative pairings of composers, styles, and genres. A noted champion of new works, in 2013 she released In 27 Pieces: The Hilary Hahn Encores, an acclaimed two-CD set that includes 27 brief pieces she commissioned from 27 contemporary composers, among them Du Yun, Max Richter, Einojuhani Rautavaara, and Nico Muhly. In 2020, she joined forces with roboticist and tech entrepreneur Carol E. Reiley to launch DeepMusic.ai, an organization whose groundbreaking mission is to weave together the artificial intelligence (AI) and arts communities.

For Hahn, these musical adventures are central to her artistic process. “For me it’s not crossover,” Hahn once explained to The Seattle Times. I just enter their world. It frees you up to think in a different way from what you’ve been trained to do.” Only on Carnegie Hall+, subscribers can follow the violinist’s journey from youthful star to the groundbreaking artist she has become by streaming the 2020 documentary Hilary Hahn: Evolution of an Artist, which pinpoints many of her career highlights while also featuring her enduring taste for new challenges.

“In music you can find your own niche,” she told The New York Times in 2002, on the eve of her solo recital debut at Carnegie Hall. “You can do what you want to do. There is really no job description. You have to find your own way, and that’s fun.”

Photography: Hahn by Michael Patrick O’Leary, Hahn and the Minnesota Orchestra by Steve J. Sherman.