I just got back from Lincoln Center, where I heard Hilary Hahn play the Elgar Violin Concerto with Sir Colin Davis and the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall. I rarely go to orchestral concerts nowadays–it’s been months since I last heard the Philharmonic live, and I only went this time at the urging of a friend–and I was struck anew by how alienated I am from the increasingly tedious experience of traditional classical concertgoing, at least as it’s practiced in Manhattan. The ugly hall, the gray acoustics, the snidely knowing intermission chat, the coughing and ill-timed applause and near-complete lack of young faces in the audience: all these depress me so much that I find it hard to push them aside and attend to the music. The first half of the program, Janacek’s Taras Bulba and Sibelius’ En Saga, was well played, but I simply wasn’t there: I pulled my head into my shell and sat it out.
Not so the second half. For one thing, Hilary Hahn is an extraordinary artist, far more so than is generally understood, her fast-rising fame notwithstanding. I wrote about her four years ago in Time, whose editors had just dubbed her “America’s best young classical musician,” a fatuous mass-media plaudit that I did my best to put into some kind of sane perspective:
Yes, classical-music whiz kids are as common as laid-off dot.com executives, but Hilary Hahn is no robotic virtuoso. Her tone is lean and sweet, her interpretations smart and unshowy; even the hardest-boiled prodigy-hating critics in the business go all mushy when she plays Bach, Beethoven, Barber and Bernstein….
Hahn began studying violin at the age of four, entered Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music at 10 and signed an exclusive recording contract with Sony Classical at 16. But she doesn’t think of herself as a prodigy. “A prodigy, in my mind, is someone who practices eight hours a day and has a big concert career at 13,” she once told a reporter. “That’s not my style. I practice maybe half that much, and I’ve had a pretty normal life.”
“Normal” may not be a totally accurate way to describe the life of someone who made her debut with a major orchestra when she was 12 years old. Still, Hahn has a point. The hot glare of big-media publicity can affect prodigies like a sun lamp: first you blossom, then you blister. But this wunderkind has paced her career sensibly, steering clear of the pitfalls that await unformed artists who push themselves (or are pushed) too hard. Now, at 21, she is a fully mature musician with a style all her own….
Listening to Hahn’s glowing recording
of Samuel Barber’s gently poetic Violin Concerto, one has the same feeling of intimacy as if the two of you were having dinner together. Only a very real person–a whole self–can make music that way. Far too many prodigies crash, burn and vanish, but this remarkable young woman seems here to stay.
All this was true enough when I wrote it, but it doesn’t come anywhere near describing what I heard a couple of hours ago. Hahn is now a profoundly gifted woman who has somehow retained much of the child prodigy’s mystery. Her playing is simple and wholly unaffected, though in no way na