The concertgoers Sunday night at the Broward Center for Hilary Hahn’s recital heard one of the finest violinists working today, but they also heard much more.
They were present for nothing less than a festival of brand-new music, all of it worthy, and some of it that could have strong claims for the repertory.
Hahn, who turns 32 at the end of this month, has had a remarkable career since the Baltimorean entered the Curtis Institute at the tender age of 10. The winner of two Grammys, she’s an indefatigable recording artist whose catalog is testimony to how discipline, hard work, and intellectual curiosity will allow a performer to enjoy the fullest flowering of her talent.
There are violinists with a more arresting tone quality and a more dramatic stage presence, but there are very few with Hahn’s particular kind of accuracy and thoroughgoing mastery of every musical detail. This is a player who has carefully thought out how she wants every phrase to go, and so much so that she then can take interpretive risks on the fly in real time.
Sunday night’s concert marked the end of Hahn’s current tour, in which she is debuting half of 26 commissioned “encores,” short works by major and emerging composers around the globe that Hahn has spent the past couple years commissioning, mostly by cold-calling writers she admires. And she’s commissioned a 27th and final encore from the global public, giving composers anywhere a chance to write one for her.
That alone is remarkable (as is her low-key way of going about it; more flamboyant musicians would have choked cyberspace with press releases and Tweets had the idea occurred to them), but on the evidence presented from the Au-Rene Theater stage, it’s been a considerable success.
The bulk of the 13 new pieces, some of them only about a month old, were reflective in character, with slowish tempi (at least at the beginning) and a tonal language of mild dissonance. All of the pieces made effective use of the piano, played here by the Ukrainian-born Valentina Lisitsa, whose work was excellent throughout, and occasionally showed off the in-your-face muscularity for which her playing is celebrated.
Hahn salted her scheduled program of music by J.S. Bach, Beethoven and Brahms with the 13 encores, playing eight in the first half and five in the second. The recital opened with seven of the pieces, followed by the Beethoven (the Sonata No. 2 in A, Op. 12, No. 2) and the eighth encore. She started the second half with Bach (the solo Sonata in G minor, BWV 1001), then played the other five encores, and ended with the Brahms (the Sonatensatz in C minor, WoO 2).
[Note: Because Hahn chose to present 13 Florida premieres at her concert, it’s only fair to give a brief assessment of each piece, though that will make this review rather long.]The best of the lot, as far as suitability for an end-of-concert confection contrast, were Jennifer Higdon’s Echo Dash (which came fourth), a non-stop, joyous, rhythmically infectious workout for both instruments, and the first-half closer, Israeli composer Avner Dorman’s Memory Games, whose aggressive opening gambit was close to jazz-rock, with its back-and-forth modal harmonies and booty-shaking syncopations.
Two of the new pieces were striking for sheer beauty: Whispering, by the 83-year-old Finnish master Einojuhani Rautavaara (played ninth), in which a melancholy line rises above relatively simple chords in the piano that beautifully unfold into different keys, followed by a delicate wash of ascending figures in the violin that take the instrument into a high-floating realm of loveliness. The other was the British composer Max Richter’s Mercy, an almost painfully gorgeous meditation on plainsong, distinguished by an insistent, sorrowing melody in the violin that grew in anguish over a repeated series of haunting, barely moving piano chords.
Richter’s piece made a most effective closing work for the recital, no less so than how the opener, Bifu, by the Japanese composer Somei Satoh, got the concert off to an auspicious start. This, too, was sweetly sad, as a gently dropping scale made its delicate way over the first five notes of a minor-key scale, traveling up and down in the piano. Tina Davidson’s Blue Curve of the East (played 11th) made good use of pizzicati and rhythm and opened into a wiry, tense theme that added another layer of color to a vivid, engaging piece by this expert American composer.
The German-Danish composer Søren Nils Eichberg’s Levitation preceded the Davidson, and focused on a four-note climbing scale pattern that then repeated slightly higher, driving the music forward, in a piece of power and density that culminated in a landscape marked by big trills. American composer Paul Moravec’s Blue Fiddle, which came after the Davidson, had a first section marked by two bluesy falling chromatic licks and thick, dark chords in the piano, after which came a strongly rhythmic second section full of acrobatics for both instruments, played surpassingly well by both women.
Gillian Whitehead, one of New Zealand’s most eminent composers, contributed Torua (played third), a reflection on the February earthquake in Christchurch; its tone was set early on by a tender, mournful piano progression and striving, rising themes for the violin. It closed in memorable fashion, with plucked harmonics for the violin and pressed notes in the piano creating an exceptional coda of hollow-sounding notes that evaporated quietly.
The sixth encore of the night, Solitude d’Automne, by the Macau-born Chinese composer Bun-Ching Lam (now a resident of Paris), had a similarly haunting opening of hushed single notes in the piano, setting the stage for a landscape of quiet, stark, fractured music that ended in stasis. The young American composer Nico Muhly’s Two Voices (which came second), offered a gently expanding series of melodic fragments and plain chords for the violin over a one-note piano part that eventually fell slightly, changing the shading but not the overall mood, which was contemplative and soft, expiring in a straightforward minor-key chord.
The Greek composer Christos Hatzis’s Coming To (played seventh), imaginatively presented the waking process, with half-heard passages of what sounded like distorted Big Band melodies as the volume slowly grew. Hatzis’ piece climaxed with a big, almost-schmaltzy theme that Hahn and Lisitsa played with gusto. The fifth encore, Speak, Memory, by the Russian-born pianist and composer Lera Auerbach, referenced the Nabokov memoir of that title with a somber, passionate theme for the violin singing amid a dark, severe harmonic framework.
The decent-sized audience received all these works with politeness, but with real enthusiasm for the Higdon, Dorman and Richter pieces. They were warmest, though, for the Bach, music that Hahn has held close to her heart all her musical life.
And the G minor sonata got a superb performance that showed why Hahn is in the elite of today’s violin players. She has no intonation problems, as the repeated octaves in the first movement, all beautifully in tune, demonstrated, and her command of her instrument is so thorough that she was able to present this music wholly as something of hers, and not something in which every minute of the effort to learn and interpret it was also on display.
The first movement was nobility personified, elegiac without being overwrought, elegant without being precious, and all of the elaborate filigree of the French overture-style writing pearl-like and smooth. Her second-movement Fugue was also an object lesson in the importance of control, with Hahn able to let each inner voice sing out perfectly without losing track of the tempo or everything else going on the music.
The third movement Sarabande was in one way the high point of the sonata in that she gave it a kind of wilting grace that was not only very attractive but also focused attention on the melody of the movement, giving it shape and charm. She played the closing Presto with fire and absolute accuracy, the pace never flagging and with each note sounded to its fullest even as each one flew by.
The Beethoven sonata got a good, crisp reading here, with a brisk tempo in the opening movement and careful attention paid to the humorousness of the two-note figures that make up the main theme. Hahn played the secondary theme with a different kind of accent both times, looking over at Lisitsa, but the pianist didn’t take the hint in her echo, playing it the same way both times.
The Andante second movement was lovingly and gingerly crafted, with a gentle but insistent push on the major-key secondary theme, bringing out its simple beauty and inner tension. The finale sounded a little rushed, and lost a bit of its wit and playfulness, fine as the playing from both women was.
The scherzo movement that Brahms wrote for the collaborative sonata of 1853 (with Schumann and Albert Dietrich), which ended the concert, also was somewhat overheated, though there was no denying its excitement. Lisitsa gave the big chordal outbursts a bit too much heft, giving the music a somewhat lopsided shape.
After the ovations from the crowd, Hahn, who was wearing a striking red strapless dress with an appliqué starburst design, returned for an encore with Lisitsa. The two have just released a beautiful recording of the four sonatas of Charles Ives, and so closed their concert with Ives’ Largo, written in 1901 for a violin sonata the composer later discarded.
This was a beautiful, grave and searching Ives, and another example of Hahn’s willingness to challenge her audience in the belief that they’ll come right along with her, even through a concert made almost entirely of brand-new music. Much of the audience might not have been aware of what a rare, exceptional achievement they were sitting through, but Hahn pulled it off, helped along by her modest, almost apologetic manner during her remarks, which no doubt helped win her auditors over.
This recital will stand without question as one of the major events of this concert season, no matter what comes next. Hilary Hahn has done a wonderful thing for the cause of contemporary classical music by commissioning all this fresh work, being unafraid to program every bar of it, and playing it definitively and brilliantly. It was, and is, an astonishing achievement.