(photo: Dana van Leeuwen/Decca)

It was the best of timing, it was the worst of timing. In September 2019, Hilary Hahn laid down her violin and started what should have been a year-long sabbatical. The idea was to withdraw from the hubbub of work and concert life; to find space for thought and reflection; to ‘look at how things are, what I really want to do going forward, and then remerge’, in the violinist’s own words.

Watching in horror as the classical music sector imploded hadn’t been part of the plan. ‘It was a scramble, as it was for everyone,’ Hahn says of March to May, when the Covid-19 pandemic halted life as we know it. ‘At first I went into grief mode – there goes the sabbatical I’ve been planning for 10 years. As far as its processes and aims were concerned, it was over.’ Watercolour painting, college courses and the luxury of non-work travel were replaced with Hahn, her husband and their two young children ‘just supporting each other as a family’ at home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

As the weeks edged past, Hahn sensed she would not be picking up where she left off once she returned to her career in September 2020. Only then did her sabbatical begin to resurrect. ‘I realised I could not have been taught more from any other version of it,’ she says; ‘it became an intense, pressure-cooker internal-growth experience, which had actually been the point all along. The idea had been to take away the other stuff and really get down to the core. This experience really did that.’

When we speak online at the end of 2020, it is exactly two decades since a 20-year-old Hahn made her first appearance on Gramophone’s cover, and just shy of a quarter of a century since she recorded her first album. Sitting in her studio a drive away from her home, Hahn is perfectly and symmetrically framed by the Zoom screen, her tight-necked red blouse offset by the arabesque of patterned yellow wallpaper. The blue eyes that are known to fix their subjects with an almost confrontational glare have only marginally less power on screen.

Back in 2000, Adam Sweeting introduced Hahn in the same terms that could be used today: a violinist whose informality conceals her hard nose, and whose extraordinary technique is itself hidden by wise and lucid playing. ‘No violinist currently performing makes a lovelier sound,’ wrote Rob Cowan of her 2008 coupling of Sibelius and Schoenberg concertos, reaching for more superlatives a decade later when reviewing her Recording of the Month solo Bach. But even in 2000, Hahn was evidently as serious about Bach as she was about commissioning new works. That same year, she was already using the internet to update her fans and post messages from the road.

The lightning-speed development of classical music’s digital profile during the first six months of shutdown overtook even the tech-savvy Hahn. ‘I had a bunch of catching up to do when I came back,’ she says; ‘I was like, OK, what is this streaming and self-filming world that I am in? How do I relate to that? Everything that people had been doing from March they seemed to have gotten into their systems, sorted their relationships with. I’ve been trying to figure out my relationship with it since the fall – seeing if there’s stuff I can learn from the way people are connecting and sharing music now, that I can take with me into future seasons.’

Is that as simple as believing a straight ‘filmed concert’ insufficient? ‘Well it’s maybe not very personal. You have to take into account the human experience. What people want has been changing: in the spring I’m guessing people wanted to maintain some of their plans, seeing stuff in whatever format. They wanted different things in the summer and they want different things now they have found their routine.’ And the industry’s famed lack of flexibility? ‘Adaptability is helpful and that’s one thing performers and promoters have probably learned. I never understood why I had to decide on recital repertoire two or three years in advance, when I had no idea what I would be passionate about then. Maybe this will be one of the areas where everyone is like, OK, there is a certain value in adaptability. But you still have to understand what the audience wants. It’s about pivoting just a little. A full pivot is irresponsible.’

(photo: OJ Slaughter)

The idea of a ‘little pivot’ might not satisfy those calling for a full revolution in the classical music sector: the decolonising of the repertoire, the cancellation of Wagner and so on. It wasn’t just Covid that happened while Hahn was temporarily lost to the world. As a progressive female and a self-confessed ‘traditional classical violinist at heart’, what angle of pivot would she prescribe to make our great institutions more representative?

‘I haven’t done an awful lot of interacting,’ she responds, drawing attention to her 15-month sequestration by way of a caveat. But the answer that follows is no less considered. ‘Our job is to make and give space to the people who have beautiful voices but who haven’t been given that space,’ she says. ‘We have to prepare the music world and the wider world for the next generation and it’s their job to be ready to walk in to what we have prepared.’ How would she quantify that – another ‘pivot’? ‘I think there’s a cycle that happens. But you have to intentionally question yourself and your assumptions, in order to find solutions that feel right and that you can maintain. We have to find the information and educate ourselves – not make it someone else’s job to educate us.’

Equality and representation, Hahn says, are paramount. She should know, frequenting a violin shop whose walls are plastered with images of great violinists of the past, all of them male (‘even in the female restroom’, she reports). The violinist pronounces with delicious irony that 2020 was the year she at last had the opportunity to work exclusively with female conductors; it was also the year she gave only two concerts, both Mozart’s Violin Concerto No 5, both conducted by Marin Alsop. ‘It matters for girls, it matters for women and it matters for people of different racial and cultural backgrounds when you don’t think you have a place somewhere,’ she says.

One of the silver linings of Covid-19 is arguably that it has forced change in that regard, particularly as orchestras have had no choice but to use local talent and pick from a more naturally gender-balanced pool of conductors and soloists as a result. I ask Hahn whether the general fermata has presented an opportunity to reset. ‘It should be happening all the time; it shouldn’t be a reaction to an event,’ she responds. ‘Art always questions itself, art is always looking for ways of representing, speaking to humanity, discussing difficult things and revealing beautiful things.’

Hahn’s poise and consistency on her instrument may not align her with the radical interpretative inquisition of a Patricia Kopatchinskaja or even a Vilde Frang. She has always questioned convention in other ways. She has explored improvisation, commissioned works via the internet, gone swimming in a concert dress and is soon to begin an artificial intelligence project with the roboticist Carol Reiley. Her performance of violin concertos filleted of all but their solo parts – a project titled ‘Hahn Solo’ (‘I didn’t make that name up by the way, it came from the fans and I let it stick’) – is a borderline eccentric way of finding new contexts for great works. Against the odds, it is proving illuminating in its own way.

It’s on recordings that we’ve experienced the subtle, sophisticated nature of Hahn’s revisionism. We have had Sibelius presented next to the composer who so fascinated him, Schoenberg; Brahms has been combined with Stravinsky, Jennifer Higdon with Tchaikovsky; Barber’s concerto has been placed with a newly commissioned work by Edgar Meyer – and that’s to deal only with concerto recordings. Next up, and back on Deutsche Grammophon, is the recording project Hahn dreamed up when everything was ‘normal’, when she was an Artist-in-Residence with Mikko Franck’s Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France in the 2018/19 season.

(photo: Dana van Leeuwen/Decca)

The album, called ‘Paris’, is a loving glance at a city Hahn has visited every year since her teens (until 2020, that is) and that saw the construction of her Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume instrument in 1865. The album’s centrepiece is Prokofiev’s First Violin Concerto, a favourite of Hahn’s that she held off recording until the time, place and orchestra were all perfectly aligned. ‘The piece has always had a Parisian feel to me,’ she says. The inclusion of Chausson’s Poème might seem obvious, but its position here is reinforced by its dedication to Eugène Ysaÿe, who taught Hahn’s own teacher, Jascha Brodsky.

Following those is a work nobody knew existed. In 2010, having played Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Manhattan-inspired Violin Concerto, Hahn commissioned him to write one of 27 new concert ‘encores’ that were also published and issued on disc. She then asked Mikko Franck, her long-time collaborator at Radio France, to sound out his Finnish compatriot about writing a longer piece, but nothing appeared before the composer died in 2016. At Rautavaara’s funeral in August that year, Franck was handed an almost-finished work, Two Serenades for violin and orchestra, that it soon transpired was the new piece for Hahn. Unusually for Rautavaara, he gave its two movements French titles, ‘Sérénade pour mon amour’ and ‘Sérénade pour la vie’.

The piece, the composer’s last, holds no great revelations and is unmistakeably late Rautavaara, from its modal harmonic shifts and colouring to a violin solo that resembles both a light source and a living creature. Perhaps there is a more than typically pronounced feeling of underlying unease – of bittersweet nostalgia. ‘In the score there’s a moment where the orchestration ends in the middle of a phrase, and you know that’s where he never got back to it,’ explains Hahn. (Kalevi Aho stepped in to complete the orchestration.) The sense of something profound leads her to slow her otherwise consistent verbal presto. ‘To be part of someone’s final work is an honour’.

Rautavaara’s work makes for a telling postlude after the Prokofiev: so much radiating stasis after so much restless movement. ‘I feel like a dancer in a role that I have been dancing for decades,’ she says of the latter. ‘My body knows it; I have a relationship with the technique as well as the music.’ Does it feel like ballet music? ‘Prokofiev has clearly choreographed physical expression into the technique: when you’re playing down-bows you can only be playing down-bows [she demonstrates with a series of jabbing vocal ‘de-de-de-de-des’] while at other times you’re simply hanging on with your chin [she sings an elastic, upward glissando] and hoping to get to that top note just before the orchestra. It’s an almost impossible piece but I feel I’ve developed a way of playing it that really works for me and has maximum impact.’

Her approach to the Chausson, she says, speaks of where she is with her musicality right now. ‘I’m getting good at staying in the moment, when I know where I am with a piece,’ she explains; the Chausson is about ‘acknowledging the emotional moment and not trying to build something – it builds itself’. More easily done if, as she claims, her relationship with Franck and the OPRF has reached the point of intuition. She has plenty of warm words for them, for ‘the colours, the connection’.

The actual connection, between the residency and the record, was made by Hahn herself. These days she masterminds her own recording projects and hands the results to DG, retaining the copyright in perpetuity. We’re a long way from the late ’90s, when Hahn signed her first multi-album deal with Sony Classical. ‘When it’s an exclusive contract for a number of records, I’ve found it’s hard to know what you’re going to need at the end when you’re at the beginning,’ she says. ‘Now I prefer to work record by record, self-producing – it’s the compromise that works for me.’

Given the record industry’s almost complete transformation over the last two decades, it seems remarkable that Hahn has retained relationships with ‘the majors’ for her entire career. ‘Labels are great if you have a good relationship: they work for you, they offer collaborative experiences and the feeling of being part of a team – having people to talk to about how you’re going to roll it out and the world in which it will exist. I think the majority of my records have been with DG and there are still a lot of audiences around the world who see that label and feel they have a relationship with it. So you sort of have them already.’

And then there’s the impressive, captive audience that Hahn counts as her own. Her social media brand, Violincase, has a combined half a million followers and she frequently uses it to disseminate pedagogical work and encourage young players. She became an ambassador for the 100 Days of Practice movement and recently recorded the Suzuki Violin School’s Books 1-3. That may well turn out to be her most significant recording of all, listened to by hundreds of thousands of aspiring young violinists around the world.

Sooner or later, she says, ‘it’s all going to click back in, and that will be the case for everyone who’s waiting to get back to performing’. When it finally happens, what lessons will she take with her from 2020? ‘It has taught me a lot about what art means to people, and what happens when the availability of it changes,’ she says. ‘There are these stories about Russia during the Second World War, when the lights would go out in a theatre but the performance would continue, because there was such an intense appreciation and need for music, art and theatre. I don’t think the proximity to that kind of intense threat has been universally felt in the venues I play in; that feeling that something could fall apart at any minute and we could experience a global trauma. Some communities go through it all the time and of course people have gone through it individually. But it hasn’t been a communal thing. I think we have all discovered something in this time when we’ve not had full, free access to everything we normally would. We have discovered what we really need, but also that we can have new experiences that really connect us.’

This article originally appeared in the February 2021 issue of Gramophone, the world's leading classical music magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today

'Paris' is released today (March 5) by Deutsche Grammophon. Read the review in the Gramophone Reviews Database