Gramophone's Recording of the Year & Instrumental Award 2024: Ysaÿe’s Violin Sonatas

Wednesday, October 2, 2024

The celebrated American violinist Hilary Hahn brings technique and personality to often‑recorded works in electrifying accounts that are set to be a new benchmark

When Rob Cowan first greeted Hilary Hahn’s album of Ysaÿe’s Six Sonatas for Violin Solo in these pages, as August 2023’s Recording of the Month, he hailed it as a career best, presented with ‘technical mastery, unabashed confidence and abundant imagination … that will be difficult to equal, let alone surpass’. Never were truer words written. The combination of these readings’ character, vibrant boldness and virtuosity, together with the warmly polished class of engineer-producer Antonio Oliart Ros’s capturing, has produced something so special that it’s hard to imagine how any future recording could possibly give the listener anything of greater artistic or sonic worth. I would also add that there’s something subtly, excitingly different about Hahn’s sound: her trademark radiance and sleekly long-lined, steely power coming is now imbued with a glowing richness, tonal depth and inner serenity.

Hilary Hahn (photo: Chris Lee)

One particularly special element of Hahn’s interpretation is how her playing pays homage to Ysaÿe and the six violinist friends his sonatas honour – in these performances each individual sonata featuring something of the linguistic DNA of its dedicatee and wider influences – while equally remaining true to her own musical personality. The result is six fascinatingly distinct musical worlds. Rob highlighted how audibly the ghost of Kreisler hovers over Hahn’s playing in the Fourth, dedicated to him. To that, I’ll add that I can’t think of a more boldly resplendent and Spanish-feeling reading of the Sixth, dedicated to the Spanish virtuoso Manuel Quiroga. This sonata can often feel a bit studied, but Hahn appears not only to have recognised and voiced its Spanish rhythms, inflections and temperament, but to have internalised them so they become fluently idiomatic, with an off-the-cuff-feeling and passionate expression. It’s truly exciting.

Whether you are on your seventh listen or your 70th, you will notice new details and feel freshly in awe

Then there’s the utter ease and perfection of Hahn’s technique. While this inevitably makes for an exhilarating listen in the overtly virtuosic writing – just revel in the evenness and liquid gleam in the Second Sonata’s final ‘Furies’, with its double-stopped bariolage and arpeggiated flourishes – it’s perhaps even more awe-inspiring in those slow-spun moments of hush where there really is no place to hide (and still less in this comparatively dry studio acoustic). Hahn’s piano is so, so quiet and superbly controlled. For a prime example of this, head to the central section of the First Sonata’s Grave, played at such a murmur that you could hear a pin drop, with the silence around the notes worked to a degree that feels subversively distinctive, even while being perfectly within the score’s parameters.

Hilary Hahn (photo: Chris Lee)

Further pleasures include her long legato phrasing in even the trickiest places, such as the opening pizzicato choral writing of the Fourth Sonata’s Sarabande and the kaleidoscopic variety of her portamento – I adore her sensuous slide up to the third note of No 5, ‘L’Aurore’. I just love the tautly shaped and voiced theatre of it all. Has the Second Sonata’s ‘Malincolia’ ‘Dies irae’ quote ever sounded so heart-stoppingly bleak, or that of its ‘Furies’ so sharply wicked?

Whether you are on your seventh listen or your 70th, you will notice new details and feel freshly in awe. These Ysaÿe readings will remain a benchmark long after the current Gramophone team has hung up its pens. Charlotte Gardner