The 19-year-old Hilary Hahn follows up the success of her first Sony disc (chosen as 'Recording of the Month' in the March 1999 issue of Gramophone) with this imaginative and highly enjoyable coupling of the Barber Concerto and a new work specially written for her by the double-bass player and composer, Edgar Meyer. That first disc coupled the Beethoven Concerto with one of the deepest of Leonard Bernstein's works, the Plato-inspired Serenade, and once again she shows her natural feeling for the American brand of late romanticism, bringing out heartfelt emotion without overplaying it.
Here, too, as in the Bernstein, she relies on what Rob Cowan described as her 'sweet-centred tone', her immaculate technique and lyrical flair, warmly supported in both works by the St Paul Chamber Orchestra under Hugh Wolff. There have been a number of outstanding versions of the Barber Concerto in recent years, notably the two I have listed, and Hahn's is among the finest ever. She stands between the urgently, fullbloodedly romantic Shaham and the more meditative Bell.
It is partly a question of recording balances. Bell has the advantage of a recording which, setting him a little further back, allows pianissimos to be registered in a genuine hush. Hahn, like Shaham, is placed well forward, and it is hardly her fault that dynamic contrasts are reduced. She certainly plays softly, but the sound that emerges is still fairly robust, as in the soloist's delayed entry in the lovely slow movement.
The use of a chamber orchestra also affects the balance. The extra weight in the orchestral sound on the DG and Decca discs is here compensated to a degree by the incisiveness of the St Paul Chamber Orchestra under Hugh Wolff, with textures a fraction clearer in detail. Even so, in the long introduction to the Andante a smaller body of strings, however refined, cannot quite match in ear-catching beauty the bigger string sections of the LSO and Baltimore Symphony.
What Hahn and Wolff nicely achieve between them is a distinction between the first two movements, both of them predominantly lyrical. Deceptively, the first is marked Allegro (hardly sounding it), but here one registers it as a taut first movement leading to a powerful climax. Speeds in both the first two movements are a fraction broader than with either rival, but Hahn reserves her big coup for the Presto finale which is noticeably faster than either rival's, offering quicksilver brilliance and pinpoint articulation.
Meyer's Concerto - faxed to Hahn page by page during composition as she went touring - makes an apt coupling. Unashamedly tonal and freely lyrical, it opens with a yearning folk-like melody that echoes Vaughan Williams, and there is also a folk-like, pentatonic cut to some of the writing in both of the two substantial movements. The composer's own note is disappointingly vague, but the music itself presents no problem, a free set of variations in clearly contrasted sections leading to a virtuoso exercise in using a persistent pedal note.R1 '0005002'